The Tools of Disinformation and Propaganda

"In wartime they attack a part of the body that other weapons cannot reach in an attempt to affect the way which participants perform on the field of battle." (Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, p. 9)
Therefore the demonstrated tools refer to political propaganda in the two World Wars.

Propaganda has the ability to change a war, a natural evil, into a so-called "just" war. Violence then is supposedly defense, no more aggression.

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Further Tools: Photography

Art has always contributed a lot to disinformation.
Many modern tools for disinformation are used in art/photography.
Harold D. Lasswell once stated that propaganda was cheaper than violence. Today this is no longer true. Technology has created new tools for propaganda and disinformation - and they are expensive. But by now our possibilities to manipulate pictures and stories have gone so far that it can get difficult to tell the difference between the original and a manipulation.

Trillions of photographs have been taken in the 20th century. Too many to look at, too many to control them and their use. A paradise for manipulation.
We have to keep in mind: There is the world, and there exist pictures of the world, which does not mean that both are the same thing. Photographs are not objective, because the photographer selects the part of the world which is becoming a picture. The rest is left out.

Some tools for manipulation of photography are:



Some of those are digital ways of manipulation, which helps to change pictures in many ways without showing the manipulation.

Pictures taken from the internet could be anything and come from anywhere. To proof the source is nearly impossible. Therefore scientists created on watermarks for pictures, which make it impossible to "steal" or manipulate a picture out of the net.

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Democracy


How is democracy concerned with propaganda and disinformation?
"Democratic governments must tolerate a free press, regardless of criticism. It is a measure of their democracy." (Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, p. 147)
Disinformation is not at all the contrary of democracy.
The idea that democracy means a system to disclose disinformation or even to be the opposite of disinformation, is itself a disinforming message, because democracies themselves frequently use that tool, if it serves their purposes, like in war, economy and elections.
No (contemporary) political/ideological system is safe from propaganda and disinformation. All of them are using them if it seems necessary and appropriate. Democracy, always pretending to be the most liberal and most human system, is no exception.

For Military disinformation/propaganda see:
http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/ArmsPropaganda.asp

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Bad Aibling Station

Latitude: 47.86353, Longitude: 12.00983

RSOC - Bad Aibling is a ground station for the interception of civil and military satellite communications traffic operated by the NSA. About 1000 personnel are on the staff at the Bad Aibling Regional SIGINT Operations Center in Germany, which conducts satellite communications interception activities and is also a downlink station for geostationary SIGINT satellites, like the CANYON program or the MAGNUM/ORION system. Operational responsibility of the groundstation was transfered to the ARMY Intelligence and Security Command in 1995, but there is also influence from the Air Force's 402nd Intelligence Squadron. Till the end of the cold war the main target was the Soviet Union.

for more information:

Description by FAS intelligence resource program.

http://www.fas.org/irp/facility/bad_aibling.htm

Description of the tasks of the Signals Intelligence Brigade.

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm34-37_97/6-chap.htm

Look at a detailed guide for military newbies at Bad Aibling.

http://www.dmdc.osd.mil/sites/owa/Installation.prc_Home?p_SID=&p_DB=P

http://www.fas.org/irp/facility/bad_aibling.h...
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm34-37_97...
http://www.dmdc.osd.mil/sites/owa/Installatio...
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World Wide Web (WWW)

Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and Java applets, so making multimedia content possible.

Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many servers as possible and index the stored information. (For regularly updated lists of the 100 most popular words that people are entering into search engines, click here). No search engine can retrieve all information on the whole World Wide Web; every search engine covers just a small part of it.

Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes consoling, but threatening too.

According to the Internet domain survey of the Internet Software Consortium the number of Internet host computers is growing rapidly. In October 1969 the first two computers were connected; this number grows to 376.000 in January 1991 and 72,398.092 in January 2000.

World Wide Web History Project, http://www.webhistory.org/home.html

http://www.searchwords.com/
http://www.islandnet.com/deathnet/
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/199...
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Menwith Hill Station

Menwith Hill Station is one of the biggest groundstations in the UKUSA alliance.It is run by the US National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors the world's communication for US intelligence. Menwith Hill employs 1,200 US civilians and servicemen to work around the clock. It went trough different stages of interception technology. First it was established to intercept radio signals, but now the main focus lays on intercepting and monitoring communication satellites with primary targets Europe, northern Africa and western Asia.

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