The British Propaganda Campaign in World War I

The British set up a unique system for propaganda, involving GB, the USA and all the colonies. Most different agencies and civilians worked together, the civilians not always knowing about the machinery behind.
During the first years of the war the main goal was to achieve a U.S.-entry to the war on Britain's side of the battle. All propaganda was working on this, which meant to destroy Germany's reputation and create dark stereotypes about them, which was an easy task as the Germans were not only fatally unlucky but also very weak in propaganda. At the same time the U.S.-citizens' opinion about the war had to be influenced. The most promising way to do so was by starting with the men in power.

One of the most beloved tools at that time was the use of atrocity stories; and most popular among the masses were cartoons, furthermore posters, an element perfectioned by the USSR in World War I and II, and movies.

The particular thing was that British propaganda finally had an effect on the German population. Soldiers at the front and people at home received the disinformation messages, mostly pamphlets that had been dropped by aeroplanes or balloons.
Together with the development of the fightings turning against the Germans this kind of propaganda was able to discourage the people and make the German government lose its power of propaganda.
"Allied propaganda had caused a collapse of morale at home." (Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, p. 188)

After all this success it is hardly understandable that the British committed a huge error right after the war, an error that had bad consequences for the next war: being regarded as a tool of war and therefore regarded as inappropriate for times of peace, the propaganda institutions were closed. At about the same time similar ones were built up in Germany - first of all on paper, in Hitler's book Mein Kampf, whose author was an admirer of the British propaganda machine in World War I and decided to perfect it in his own country.

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Palm recognition

In palm recognition a 3-dimensional image of the hand is collected and compared to the stored sample. Palm recognition devices are cumbersome artefacts (unlike fingerprint and iris recognition devices) but can absorb perform a great amount of identification acts in a short time. They are therefore preferably installed in situations where a large number of people is identified, as in airports.

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Disinformation - A Definition

First of all disinformation can be explained as something that has to do with fears: it frightens us by taking away our individuality, as disinformation is not done for one single person. It is a manipulation; a manipulation the influenced persons did not ask for.

Disinformation is never the launching of one single information/message. Several - and in most cases many - different pieces make up a puzzle of deception. One single message can be called true or false, but only the combination of several and more informations makes up a system that has the power to influence opinions.
The purpose is what produces the disinformation, whereas a wrong information (even as a number of wrong informations) happening by accident represents simply a false information.
The person or group presenting a disinformation knows very well what he/it is doing. The aim is that the person who receives the disinformation gets influenced into a certain and well-planned direction. Therefore the wrong information has to reach the unconscious part of the mind, has to be integrated into personal thoughts.
A good way to reach that goal is to use a commonly known information, something familiar to reach the confidence of the recipient. The best is to use a quasi neutral message. Afterwards the real disinformation is woven into that other information. The mixture between truth, half-truth and lie is the most adequate method to get a disinformation into people's minds.
The knowledge about how to use material and how to slightly change it until the statement turns against someone or some idea, is a type of art to cope with words.

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The Romans

The Romans can be called the great inventors of myths with the purpose of propaganda. Think of Caesar, Augustus or Nero. Caesar wrote his war-documentation by using incredible (e.g. the numbers of hostile soldiers) but he also emphasized the barbarity of the foe, creating images of hatred. People back at home had to believe these manipulative stories.
Or Augustus: he reunited the Roman Empire; part of his power was due to huge efforts in propaganda, visible e.g. in the mass of coins showing his face, being sent all over the empire. He understood very well, that different cultures used different symbols - and he used them for his propaganda.
Politically the Roman army was an important factor. Propaganda in that case was used for the soldiers on the one hand, but on the other hand also for demonstrating the power of the army to the people, so they could trust in its strength. Even then security was an essential factor of politics. As long as the army functioned, the Roman Empire did as well (Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, p. 48).

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Late 1970s - Present: Fourth Generation Computers

Following the invention of the first integrated circuits always more and more components could be fitted onto one chip. LSI (Large Scale Integration) was followed by VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) and ULSI (Ultra-Large Scale Integration), which increased the number of components squeezed onto one chip into the millions and helped diminish the size as well as the price of computers. The new chips took the idea of the integrated circuit one step further as they allowed to manufacture one microprocessor which could then be programmed to meet any number of demands.

Also, ensuing the introduction of the minicomputer in the mid 1970s by the early 1980s a market for personal computers (PC) was established. As computers had become easier to use and cheaper they were no longer mainly utilized in offices and manufacturing, but also by the average consumer. Therefore the number of personal computers in use more than doubled from 2 million in 1981 to 5.5 million in 1982. Ten years later, 65 million PCs were being used.

Further developments included the creation of mobile computers (laptops and palmtops) and especially networking technology. While mainframes shared time with many terminals for many applications, networking allowed individual computers to form electronic co-operations. LANs (Local Area Network) permitted computers to share memory space, information, software and communicate with each other. Although already LANs could reach enormous proportions with the invention of the Internet an information and communication-network on a global basis was established for the first time.

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Biometric technologies

In what follows there is a brief description of the principal biometric technologies, whose respective proponents - producers, research laboratories, think tanks - mostly tend to claim superiority over the others. A frequently used definition of "biometric" is that of a "unique, measurable characteristic or trait of a human being for automatically recognizing or verifying identity" (http://www.icsa.net/services/consortia/cbdc/bg/introduction.shtml); biometrics is the study and application of such measurable characteristics. In IT environments, biometrics are categorised as "security" technologies meant to limit access to information, places and other resources to a specific group of people.

All biometric technologies are made up of the same basic processes:

1. A sample of a biometric is first collected, then transformed into digital information and stored as the "biometric template" of the person in question.

2. At every new identification, a second sample is collected and its identity with the first one is examined.

3. If the two samples are identical, the persons identity is confirmed, i.e. the system knows who the person is.

This means that access to the facility or resource can be granted or denied. It also means that information about the persons behaviour and movements has been collected. The system now knows who passed a certain identification point at which time, at what distance from the previous time, and it can combine these data with others, thereby appropriating an individual's data body.

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Introduction

Political and economic agendas change. People leave, get exchanged. Whereas one of the things that never seem to change is disinformation. Watching different kinds of cultures and regimes throughout history you will always find disinformation.
Its use is variable just like its tools. First of all it does not necessarily need words. It is possible to disinform in any kind of language (sounds, symbols, letters or with the help of the body). As it seems to have come into existence together with human communication, we need not even hope that it will disappear once in a while.
One could rather say: disinformation has always been there.
Instead of hoping to stop it we need to learn to live with it, detect it, restore it to consciousness. Even this will not be any insurance for not walking into the trap. It is an attempt, nothing else.
For detecting disinformation one needs to know what types of disinformation are possible and how they work. This site gives you some ideas about the history, tendencies and different types of disinformation, with the restriction that it will mostly be about the Western types of disinformation, as it is still harder to understand the media of disinformation in other cultures; and anyhow, many methods and tools run parallel in different cultures.

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Blaise Pascal

b. June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand, France
d. August 19, 1662, Paris, France

French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose. He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities, formulated what came to be known as Pascal's law of pressure, and propagated a religious doctrine that taught the experience of God through the heart rather than through reason. The establishment of his principle of intuitionism had an impact on such later philosophers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri Bergson and also on the Existentialists.

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water-clocks

The water-clocks are an early long-distance-communication-system. Every communicating party had exactly the same jar, with a same-size-hole that was closed and the same amount of water in it. In the jar was a stick with different messages written on. When one party wanted to tell something to the other it made a fire-sign. When the other answered, both of them opened the hole at the same time. And with the help of another fire-sign closed it again at the same time, too. In the end the water covered the stick until the point of the wanted message.

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International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC)

The ICPC aims at reducing the number of incidents of damages to submarine telecommunications cables by hazards.

The Committee also serves as a forum for the exchange of technical and legal information pertaining to submarine cable protection methods and programs and funds projects and programs, which are beneficial for the protection of submarine cables.

Membership is restricted to authorities (governmental administrations or commercial companies) owning or operating submarine telecommunications cables. As of May 1999, 67 members representing 38 nations were members.

http://www.iscpc.org

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Clipper Chip

The Clipper Chip is a cryptographic device proposed by the U.S. government that purportedly intended to protect private communications while at the same time permitting government agents to obtain the "keys" upon presentation of what has been vaguely characterized as "legal authorization." The "keys" are held by two government "escrow agents" and would enable the government to access the encrypted private communication. While Clipper would be used to encrypt voice transmissions, a similar chip known as Capstone
would be used to encrypt data. The underlying cryptographic algorithm, known as Skipjack, was developed by the National Security Agency (NSA).

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Alan Turing

b. June 23, 1912, London, England
d. June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire

English mathematician and logician who pioneered in the field of computer theory and who contributed important logical analyses of computer processes. Many mathematicians in the first decades of the 20th century had attempted to eliminate all possible error from mathematics by establishing a formal, or purely algorithmic, procedure for establishing truth. The mathematician Kurt Gödel threw up an obstacle to this effort with his incompleteness theorem. Turing was motivated by Gödel's work to seek an algorithmic method of determining whether any given propositions were undecidable, with the ultimate goal of eliminating them from mathematics. Instead, he proved in his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem [Decision Problem]" (1936) that there cannot exist any such universal method of determination and, hence, that mathematics will always contain undecidable propositions. During World War II he served with the Government Code and Cypher School, at Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, where he played a significant role in breaking the codes of the German "Enigma Machine". He also championed the theory that computers eventually could be constructed that would be capable of human thought, and he proposed the Turing test, to assess this capability. Turing's papers on the subject are widely acknowledged as the foundation of research in artificial intelligence. In 1952 Alan M. Turing committed suicide, probably because of the depressing medical treatment that he had been forced to undergo (in lieu of prison) to "cure" him of homosexuality.

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Hieroglyphs

Hieroglyphs are pictures, used for writing in ancient Egypt. First of all those pictures were used for the names of kings, later more and more signs were added, until a number of 750 pictures

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Writing

Writing and calculating came into being at about the same time. The first pictographs carved into clay tablets are used for administrative purposes. As an instrument for the administrative bodies of early empires, who began to rely on the collection, storage, processing and transmission of data, the skill of writing was restricted to a few. Being more or less separated tasks, writing and calculating converge in today's computers.

Letters are invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent, says Saint Augustine. The invention of writing made it possible to transmit and store information. No longer the ear predominates; face-to-face communication becomes more and more obsolete for administration and bureaucracy. Standardization and centralization become the constituents of high culture and vast empires as Sumer and China.

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RSA

The best known of the two-key cryptosystems developed in the mid-1980s is the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) cryptoalgorithm, which was first published in April, 1977. Since that time, the algorithm has been employed in the most widely-used Internet electronic communications encryption program, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). It is also employed in both the Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer web browsing programs in their implementations of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and by Mastercard and VISA in the Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) protocol for credit card transactions.

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