by Bill Gertz
Aside from a failure to counter information warfare, one bright spot is the United States’ program to prepare for one part of information warfare—cyberwarfare. Still, that capability has remained limited by the imposition of government policies designed to wish away information threats as somehow inconvenient relics of an earlier age. Our capability to wage information warfare—both cyber and content—also has been weakened by legal and bureaucratic impediments that have left the nation extremely vulnerable to widespread destructive cyberattacks that could kill millions.
In 2016, American government leaders and policies remained locked in destructive self-denial about these threats. The dominant thinking within government was that this is a time when adversaries are things of the past.
The central challenge for the twenty-first century will be to harness the tools of the American technological and information revolution for good. And more important, to oppose evil. Yes, the terms good and evil may sound anachronistic to newer generations raised on value-neutral liberal leftism. But the nation as a whole urgently needs to return to the values of freedom and justice for all, which have been lost in the cacophony of acrimonious political debate so prevalent today.
To remedy the problems and counter the threats outlined in this book, I am proposing a series of concrete plans and actions for creating “Information America,” a U.S. Information Agency–like organization designed for the twenty-first century and tooled for the Information Age and the threats it poses. The organization will promote fundamental American ideals and values, while working to counter lies and disinformation, using truth and facts as the ultimate weapons of information war. The task is urgent in a world racked by violence and hatred. Creating effective information-based capabilities offers the promise of solving some of the world’s most pressing problems through the use of information as a strategic tool to promote peace and freedom.
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WORLD WAR C
Munitions of the Mind
Cyberspace has become a full-blown war zone as governments across the globe clash for digital supremacy in a new, mostly invisible theater of operations.
—FIREEYE, “WORLD WAR C: UNDERSTANDING NATION-STATE MOTIVES BEHIND TODAY’S ADVANCED CYBER ATTACKS”
The world today is on fire and social media networks are providing the fuel to keep it burning. From the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, which brought thousands into the streets to protest corrupt elections, to dissidents in China pressing democratic political reform, to the Arab Spring, which morphed into the horrors of the Syrian civil war, social media is emerging as the new front in global information conflict.
The al Qaeda–inspired terrorist attack at Foot Hood, Texas, in 2009, and the Islamic State–backed terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, California, in 2015 and Orlando, Florida, in 2016 were all linked to overseas terrorism through social media. They are signs that more and increasingly deadly terrorists attacks—suicide bombings and shootings—are likely to be unleashed against the United States inside the country, despite the best efforts of American security authorities to try to stop them. The danger is real and must be recognized and countered through a concerted campaign against these threats on social media.
A key information warfare ploy of America’s Islamist enemies has involved exploiting Western governments’ indecision over what to do in response to mass killings and other deadly humanitarian disasters. The Islamists have adopted a coordinated strategy aimed at destabilizing and ultimately defeating the West with the ultimate objective of imposing an Islamic supremacist world order. The terrorists are waging jihad, or Islamic holy war, through their bombings, shootings, and other deadly attacks to create as much mayhem as possible. The strategy is based on their view that Western leaders lack the will to take the necessary steps to challenge both their actions and their ideology. Instead, the Islamists seek to provoke military responses by their non-Muslim targets that cost lives, deplete resources, and produce a kind of ideological disarmament in the West. In so doing, the enemies have manipulated the United States into hastening its own demise.
The use of Syrian refugees is a case in point. As millions of Syrians fled the Middle East and streamed into Europe beginning in 2015, little regard was given to the potential use of these refugee flows for the infiltration by Islamist terrorists and their sympathizers. Some of the worst fears were realized on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne, Germany, when around one thousand drunk and aggressive refugees went on a rape spree, sexually assaulting some eighty women at a central railway station.
Can similar attacks be expected in the United States? President Barack Obama by August 2016 had admitted 10,000 Syrian refugees, as more than 30,000 others waited for entry. While many of the refugees harbor no ill will, their ranks include Islamists who are either planning to conduct terrorists attacks or will be recruited to do so in the future. The Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Services chief, Matthew Emrich, told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that there was no way to properly screen the incoming Syrians for terrorist ties because of a lack of intelligence and an inability to check their backgrounds.
Around the same time the United States reached its 10,000-Syrian-refugees mark, the U.S. Southern Command, the military command responsible for Latin and South America, issued one of its most alarming warnings. The Southcom J-2 intelligence directorate reported in a secret dispatch that Sunni extremists from the Middle East and elsewhere were entering the United States with ease. According to officials familiar with the warning, the report was ignored because it conflicted with the Obama administration’s policy of promoting emigration by Syrians and the president’s personal sympathy toward Islam.
Britain’s government-run British Broadcasting Corporation, in an internal analysis provided to the CIA, warned in 2013 that social media was becoming a major weapon for Islamic terrorists. “The adoption of Twitter by Arabic-speaking jihad supporters has massively changed the landscape of the online jihad over the past year, presenting both opportunities and challenges for media jihad operatives,” the BBC said. “Originally embraced as a means of spreading the jihadist message to a wider audience, Twitter has now become an established feature of the online jihad.” Jihad is the Islamic concept of holy war and has been used by terrorists to conduct deadly and indiscriminate attacks in advancing the cause of creating a world dominated by Islam. According to an Islamic State magazine, Dabiq, the name Islam is derived from the Arabic words istislam and salamah, or submission and sincerity. “This is the essence of Islam, to submit to Allah sincerely (i.e., to Him alone),” the magazine stated.
The BBC in January 2016 revealed even more sophisticated Islamic State media operations that are used to project the group’s power and create the fiction that it is a fully functioning state.
“A distinct feature of IS’s media operation is its agility and ability to respond quickly to events, often outperforming state media in the Middle East,” the BBC said. “This has been enabled by the group’s sophisticated use of social media and a network of dedicated online supporters who amplify IS’s message. Despite an ongoing clampdown on IS-affiliated accounts on Twitter and other platforms, the group’s material continues to surface in a timely manner. Exploitation of the messaging app Telegram has helped the group secure a more stable and resilient mechanism for distributing its propaganda.”
Telegram is a Russian-produced messaging application that has become a key tool for Islamic State terrorists seeking to block surveillance and spying by U.S. and other intelligence services. It uses a strong data encryption that while not unbreakable is difficult to unscramble. Telegram forums used by the group include both propaganda and instructional materials, such as how to avoid being identified online.
Communications are not the only use of social media. Islamic State supporters sought to instill panic after the March 2016 terror attacks in Brussels, Belgium. Several jihadist Twitter accounts from Islamic State sympathizers spread rumors of further attacks thro
ughout the city. The tweets included statements saying not to take victims to Brussels’s St. Pierre hospital, as bombs had been planted there, and that bombs were planted at the Free University. “URGENT / Several bombs placed at European Commission! Evacuate urgently or die!” a third tweet warned.
Civil war in Syria revealed as never before the integration of both information warfare and traditional armed conflict. The Internet and social media are being used there by the Islamic State and other terrorist groups as a command-and-control platform for its forces to communicate orders, dispatch forces, synchronize military activities, and gather intelligence. Terrorists also can crowdsource—seek support from online users—their campaigns on social media to learn the best methods for building bombs and explosives, attacking targets, and even developing high-technology arms, such as unmanned aerial vehicles.
Modern warfare is shifting away from large-scale territorial conflicts between the military forces of nation-states to different forms of organized violence—including the lower-level and middle-level insurgencies and internal conflicts like those in Afghanistan and Syria. Social media also is fueling the information conflicts waged by Russia in Ukraine, and China in its maritime and territorial disputes along its periphery.
Warfare by conventional military forces to achieve victory over other conventional forces is becoming less common. Instead, information-dominated activities, such as cyberattacks, influence operations, and propaganda and disinformation attacks are dominating the modern battlefield in a bid to control and influence populations according to desired ends.
The United States and the West have failed utterly to recognize this danger while their governments continue to rely heavily on military forces for achieving state goals, despite the fact that the military is ill-suited to resolving these conflicts.
The debacle of Afghanistan highlights the problem. More than a decade and tens of billions of dollars in military activities have produced nothing approaching a stable, Western-oriented state in the mountainous and backward Southwest Asian country, which remains as prone to terrorist control as it was when al Qaeda first made the country its headquarters in the 1990s.
Social media networks currently are among the most potent arms, what Thomas Elkjer Nissen of the Royal Danish Defence College has called the “weaponization of social media.” Instead of simply destroying targets with bombs and other weapons to produce desired military effects, modern warfare is moving to the Internet and information networks like social media, while employing a broad array of nonmilitary methods—political, economic, social, psychological, cyber—to produce effects that in the past were the domain of military force. Nissen identified the militarization of social media—by both states and nonstate groups—as intelligence gathering, targeting, psychological warfare, cyberattacks, and command and control.
U.S. military information warfare programs and operations have been hampered by a destructive internal debate over informing and influencing target audiences. The military in this field has been dominated by those who advocate limiting information operations to informing, through public affairs and other media activities. The influence operations as a result have been reduced to almost zero, because the use of information influence tools may involve lying or deceiving targets and thus would represent official government lying, something currently banned in most liberal democracies as a core principle.
That must change if the United States is to prevail over its adversaries in the Information Age, as states like China, Russia, Iran, and many others routinely and systematically use lies and deception as policies authorized and deployed in pursuit of strategic goals. As mentioned, the Islamic State also uses lies and deception in its operations against the civilized world, based on the Islamic tenet that lying to infidels—anyone who is not Muslim—is not only permitted but required in pursuit of jihad and the establishment of a global Islamic-controlled world. Psychological warfare operations aimed at influencing global publics figure prominently in this new warfare waged extensively through social media networks, what have been called “munitions of the mind”—using media to persuade people to think and act in ways that benefit those using psychological warfare operations.
The Information Age and new technology for the first time have given adversaries the tools to communicate directly with target audiences to achieve strategic objectives after a time in the past when they were blocked by traditional media controls on information.
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Social media warfare is intricately connected to technology, especially the handheld communications device. Fifty years ago, on September 8, 1966, the popular science fiction TV series Star Trek broadcast its first episode. Ten minutes into the show, Starship captain James T. Kirk reached into his pocket and flipped open a small, handheld device with a gold mesh cover accompanied by a small electronic chirp. “Transporter room,” Kirk called, “lock on to us. Three beaming up.” Kirk’s communicator marveled us as a science fiction pipe dream of a small, portable device capable of making personal communications without wires in an instant. It would take Motorola engineer Martin Cooper another seven years to make the first personal cell phone call while walking the streets of Manhattan. Cooper took his inspiration for mobile phones from the Star Trek communicator.
Within a few decades, mobile communications devices rapidly evolved into the powerful handheld ones that have become ubiquitous and by 2016 represented the leading edge of the Information Age. An iPhone 7 packs more computing power than a gigantic Cray-2 supercomputer did in 1985. More than the hardware, the use of our handheld devices today is expanding the frontiers of the Internet through the use of the World Wide Web’s most popular feature: social media—information tools that facilitate everything from how we communicate to how we interact with society at large. The new media platforms are impacting all aspects of our lives, from business, to politics, to science, to relationships, and of course to journalism and the news business. It is impacting our lives in ways that were only imagined in the realm of science fiction of the 1960s.
Facebook and Twitter have emerged as the dominant social media, hosting hundreds of millions of users who interact almost constantly. Many other platforms also are popular and newer and different social media are expected to emerge in the near future. As a veteran newspaper reporter and proverbial ink-stained wretch, I have come to conclude that no other type of media on the Internet claims as much of our time and attention as social media. And these platforms are making us more interconnected, communicative, and engaged than at any other time in human history.
According to the business website eBizMBA, the top fifteen social media sites log more than 2.5 billion unique visitors, a staggering number of interactive users. In addition to Facebook and Twitter, with 1.1 billion and 310 million users, respectively, other major platforms include LinkedIn (250 million), Pinterest (250 million), Google+ (120 million), Tumblr (110 million), Instagram (100 million), VKontakte, or VK (80 million), and Flickr (65 million). Other social media powerhouses: Vine (42 million), Meetup (40 million), Tagged (38 million), ASKfm (37 million), MeetMe (15.5 million), and Classmates (15 million).
The activities on these platforms range from blogging with family and friends to promoting news and commercial interests, such as seen in the Facebook and Google+ model, to microblogging, as shown by Twitter, which mixes short messages with links to other content. LinkedIn is more commonly used by business professionals for networking, and Instagram and Flickr support avid photo and video aficionados.
After Twitter’s emergence in 2006 I considered the 140-character social media outlet as the most important emerging tool for news dissemination and an extremely valuable source of unfiltered news and information that can be available in my handheld nearly instantaneously. In the past, getting rapid news and information was limited to listening to the radio or watching breaking news on cable television. That model was shattered for me in the spring of 2013 as I sat on the balcony of my brother’s Northern Calif
ornia home overlooking San Francisco when the Associated Press first reported details in my heavily news-oriented Twitter feed announcing an explosion near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Within minutes of the April 15 terrorist attack, I knew something terrible had happened and immediately began working the story of how the two émigré brothers from Russia had become radical jihadists and set off homemade pressure-cooker bombs built from instructions posted online in an al Qaeda magazine.
Another example of a revolutionary news report for the Twitter news hall of fame, if such a place were created, would be the tweet from Pakistan by Sohaib Athar on May 1, 2011: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” Athar inadvertently had disclosed the biggest news scoop of the decade, which would later be revealed as the daring U.S. Navy SEAL special operations raid to kill al Qaeda terror leader Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.
The explosion of social media, unfortunately, is not limited to disseminating news, texting our friends, posting thoughts about the hamburger we ate for lunch, or sharing hilarious cat videos. Social media is rapidly becoming the new battleground in a larger information war being waged by a variety of states and enemies.