Max Forte's List: Web Warfare

• Israel’s foreign ministry is reported to be establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel.
• “To all intents and purposes the internet is a theatre in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must be active in that theatre, otherwise we will lose,” said Ilan Shturman, who is responsible for the project.
• The existence of an “internet warfare team” came to light when it was included in this year’s foreign ministry budget. About $150,000 has been set aside for the first stage of development, with increased funding expected next year.
• Rona Kuperboim, a columnist for Ynet, Israel’s most popular news website, denounced the initiative, saying it indicated that Israel had become a “thought-police state”.
   
    She added that “good PR cannot make the reality in the occupied territories prettier. Children are being killed, homes are being bombed, and families are starved.”
  
• there had been widespread government cooperation, with the ministry of absorption handing over contact details for hundreds of recent immigrants to Israel, who wrote pro-Israel material for websites in their native languages.

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• 'Terrorists are certainly in a Web 2.0 world now,' Homeland Security chief warns
• sees room for major improvement in creating what she called a "culture of collective responsibility."
• "The terrorists in Mumbai, for example, made use of GPS devices, satellite phones, mapping websites like Google Earth and even live cable TV," she said.
• "If 9/11 happened in a Web 1.0 world, terrorists are certainly in a Web 2.0 world now," she said.
• network climate
• Relying on citizens to be better scouts in the "war on terror"
• She said she added a "prominent" former computer hacker to her advisory council last month
• "Are you suggesting we need to train our people from school days to be more alert and watch more carefully … their schoolmates, their workers, their family, their neighbours, and then to more effectively report what they say to some authority?" one audience member asked.

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• Recently finished reading "The Bookseller of Kabul" by Asne Seierstad. Powerful insights into the lives of Afghan women and girls.
• Gratified that CAPT Speicher's remains have been identified. Grateful for his service, sacrifice and courage. Thoughts are with his family.
• Presided over retirement for Vice Adm. Nancy Brown today. What a role model, not just for women, but for ALL naval officers. Will miss her.
• Visited with Marines in Helmand yesterday. They truly understand counterinsurgency, not one civilian casualty. Protecting the Afghan people.

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• "It is not in fact going around the chain of command; it allows us to connect to the chain of command in ways we have not been able to experience before."

• “These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday. “The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”
• “The mechanisms for social networking were never designed for security and filtering. They make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users,”

• "My very first recruiting officer was G.I. Joe,"
• "Only later would I learn   just how enmeshed G.I. Joe's manufacturer, Hasbro, was with the military. One   instance of this close association came to me in 2003 when the Department of   Defense shared the specifications for their Future Force Warrior concept  with the toy company, even before awarding the contract to General Dynamics.   More important to the military these days are its ties to video game manufacturers.   The latter turn tax-payer-funded combat simulators into first-person shooters   that, in effect, pre-train youngsters in small-unit military tactics and irregular   warfare."
• Turse also talks of the Microsoft Xbox game "Close Combat: First to Fight,"     which was originally a training tool developed for the US Marine Corps by civilian   contractor Destineer Studios.   His book reveals that the game "was created under the direction of more   than 40 active-duty Marines, fresh from the frontlines of combat in the Middle   East [who] worked side-by-side with the development team to put the exact tactics   they used in combat into "First Fight."
• The process of brainwashing and desensitization by the military begins affecting   children in the US from a very early age. It is not insignificant that little   boys wear camouflage and run around playing with toy guns whenever they get   an opportunity.
• Another irresistible agent that the US military has deployed in its recruitment   and support drive is films. Turse elaborates the point, "In addition to   toys and video games, the military has also strengthened its ties to Hollywood   in recent years. Turning back to G.I. Joe, we can see this with the new movie:   'G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.'
• By glamorizing and   sentimentalizing warfare and camouflaging the truth behind unprovoked aggression,   these films have served their purpose well. To name a few of these, we have:   "Pearl Harbor," "Behind Enemy Lines," "Letters From   Iwo Jima," "We Were Soldiers," "Saving Private Ryan,"   "Black Hawk Down," "Clear and Present Danger," and a host   of others. If one looks at Hollywood's history of films that glamorize the US   military, there are literally hundreds more.
• "By co-opting the civilian 'culture of cool' the military   corporate complex is able to create positive associations with the armed forces,   immerse the young in an alluring, militarized world of fun, and make interaction   with the military sound second nature to today's Americans. The military is   now in the midst of a full-scale occupation of the entertainment industry, conducted   with far more skill (and enthusiasm on the part of the occupied) than America's   debacle in Iraq."
• The successful integration of "culture of cool" and the culture of   military is evident in the language of the veterans when they return home and   speak of their actions against the people of Iraq. Expressions straight out   of video game vocabularies like "lit you up," and "smoked 'em"   are commonplace in their speech.
• All available avenues have been explored by the Pentagon in its quest for a   wide-based acceptance of its policies. Social networking sites like Facebook   and Twitter have also been utilized for the tasks of seeking out young recruits   and spreading its message.
•  That the US military has made blatant use of the Media and the entertainment   industry to indoctrinate the young American mind is common knowledge. What has   perhaps gone unnoticed is how the military is insidiously infiltrating our social   and public lives. Earlier this summer, on Memorial Day weekend in Times Square,   New York City, the military showcased weaponry while recruiters posed for pictures   and engaged in small talk   with women, men, children and families. Women fondled rocket launchers, small children pretended   to fire heavy machine guns, young boys posed with   assault rifles,   and even housewives enjoyed the act of aiming rocket launchers.
• The militarization of US culture in the minds of US citizens has grown ubiquitous.
• Author/journalist Chris Hedges articulated the issue for Truthout, "Well,   the myth of war, at its core, is really a very visceral form of self-exaltation.   It is about the empowerment of our nation, of our society, and by extension,   our own empowerment. In the coverage, for instance, of the invasion of Iraq,   this was clearly evident on the cable news channels where the way the war was   covered was to bring in retired military to explain the power and precision   and might of our own weapons. And I think, very much, one was made to identify   with the power of those weapons and the power of the state. So war has a kind   of seductive appeal. The entertainment industry makes a lot of money off it.   The politicians perpetuate the myth of war, they romanticize war, they use words   like glory, honor, courage, manhood, to appeal to desires on the part of large   segments of the population who feel relatively powerless and relatively anonymous.   And war is a way of elevating them, or at least so they believe, into a kind   of nobility that peace time existence doesn't offer them."

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• The outage that knocked Twitter offline for hours was traced to an attack on a lone blogger in the former Soviet republic of Georgia — but the collateral damage that left millions around the world tweetless showed just how much havoc an isolated cyberdispute can cause
• The attacks Thursday also slowed down Facebook and caused problems for the online diary site LiveJournal.
• Twitter, the 140-character-or-less messaging site used by celebrities, businesses and even Iranian protesters, suffered a total outage that lasted several hours.
• Twitter crashed because of a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers command scores of computers toward a single site at the same time to prevent legitimate traffic from getting through. The attack was targeted at a blogger who goes by "Cyxymu" — Cyrillic spelling of Sukhumi, a city in the breakaway territory of Abkhazia in Georgia — on several Web sites, including Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal.
• But they could have just as well targeted Twitter itself. That's because the effects were the same whether the excess traffic went to the "twitter.com" home page or to the page for Cyxymu at "twitter.com/cyxymu." Same with Facebook and LiveJournal.

• The attacks seemed to come in two waves.

   

  The first was a spam campaign consisting of e-mails with links back to posts by Cyxymu. This drove some traffic to the blogger's postings on various social-networking sites, possibly to disparage him as the source of the spam.

   

  The second and more destructive phase consisted of the denial-of-service attack, which attacked the sites' servers by sending it lots of junk requests — presumably to prevent people from reading his viewpoints.
• Dickenson said Twitter was more vulnerable than Facebook and other sites because the company's servers are hosted by a single service provider, something larger Web sites tend to avoid as they grow.
• According to comScore, Twitter had 20.1 million unique visitors in the United States in June, some 34 times the 593,000 a year earlier. This compares with Facebook's 77 million this June, more than double the 37.4 million in the prior year.

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• From her computer, she enters a world where young Muslims openly volunteer to fight against US-led coalition troops in Afghanistan or learn how to make explosives out of everyday materials.
• The 24-year-old Singaporean research analyst is constantly on the lookout for attack manuals, video clips of Islamist militants in training and fiery extremist chatter that could hint at an imminent assault somewhere.
• "This whole thing is worrying," she told AFP in an interview, referring to a growing trend of individuals imbibing radical ideas online.
• research analysts at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies who monitor extremist websites daily to get a sense of an emerging battleground in the fight against terrorism.
• "After you sit down, think about it and do a trend analysis, you say 'Oh my God! this is really happening,'"
• International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research.
• "You can see the radicalisation process unfold online."
• There are an estimated 5,500-6,000 websites worldwide peddling extremist ideas, according to the researchers, who work from a spartan office in a suburban university campus.
• Singapore, a staunch US ally and international finance centre, considers itself a prime target for terrorist attacks like last month's deadly hotel bombings in Jakarta aimed at symbols of Western influence.
• Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng has warned that "self-radicalised" individuals have emerged as a new security threat.
• In 2007, Singapore announced the arrest of five suspected Islamic militants, among them local law lecturer Abdul Basheer Abdul Kader, who allegedly planned to pursue "jihad" in Afghanistan after getting radical ideas from the Internet.
• "The cyberdomain is an area where governments have been gradually moving into," Jerard said.
• "It's a changing threat landscape. I think it is increasingly becoming important and governments are definitely enthusiastic about countering it and putting enough resources in place."

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