USA Today is reporting a disturbing and blatantly illegal propaganda campaign apparently being conducted by Pentagon contractors.
A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites.
Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names.
A Pentagon spokesman denied being aware of any such activities on the part of its contractors, but the sites mysteriously disappeared after the contractors were asked about them.
Oh I’m sure its all perfectly innocent, PentaGanda Corp were probably just helping out the investigation by showing an example of the kinds of things that nasty people do!
It was only a test of the new cyber-warfare theory. If this had been a real cyberwar-attack, they would have also removed all references to the actual person on the internet.
This was only a test.
If there is one thing the military is about it is practice. This applies because most of the military contractors are ex-military and those that aren’t tend to adopt the attitudes.
So what do you do when a new team comes together? You practice your plan. But wait, to practice you need a target. What name pops to mind … sure … that guy that was saying nasty things about what we do …
This isn’t the first time this sort of thing happened. Years ago there were complaints, and at least on ‘near miss’ (civilian pilots are such wusses) after an interception squadron started using commercial airliners as practice targets for their anti-bomber practice runs.
In essence they would stalk the airliner, position themselves optimally in relationship to it, and make a high-speed dash until it was in weapon’s range. If the run was for a radar homed missile the airline pilots probably was aware of the fighters as they do their thing at a considerable distance. Things get quite snug if they simulated gunnery with fighters potentially missing the airliner by a few meters. All in a day’s work for fighter pilots that sort of intimacy is quite alarming to your average airline pilot.
Anyway, this went on for some time until the pilots complained and the fighter pilots were caught on radar pulling this stunt. Telephone calls were made, voices were raised, a stink enveloped a certain fighter command and the word was passed down from on high that any fighter pilot using anything but the approved targets for practice will spend the rest of their career flying a desk is a very cold, dark place.
Odds are they wanted to practice their computer/propaganda mojo to see what they could do, how well they could do it, and how fast. Odds are they whole thing was an hours work by a small team. But then they didn’t take it down until someone nudged them. See … taking it down was not on the checklist or in the mission requirements. So once up it was beer-thirty.
Of course the guys in the group are not concerned with the ethics of a civilian contractor working with the DoD having this sort of skill set, mission. Nor do they get into the finer points of doing this sort of thing to a civilian or journalist. They are mainly concerned with doing, and being good at, their job, that and getting paid and laid. Same as the fighter pilots buzzing airliners. Just another practice run to stay sharp.
Gee, why does this sound all too familiar?