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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Positive Images

Certainly propaganda needs positive aspects as well:
The art of circulating positive images even if the actual situation is unsuccessful, like in a war or before elections, when all opinion-polls are negative, is one which needs talent. Napoleon obviously possessed this talent.
Another master of this was Adolf Hitler and the people working next to him. The way how he was portrayed as the father of the nation, the sensitive guide through that war - even at a moment when it should have been clear that there was nothing left to win for the Germans/Austrians in that war - is quite extraordinary and demonstrates a hard piece of work. But more than anything else it need the population's will to believe those propaganda-messages. And the Germans preferred to believe in Hitler than to look for another truth.

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Racism on the Internet

The internet can be regarded as a mirror of the variety of interests, attitudes and needs of human kind. Propaganda and disinformation in that way have to be part of it, whether they struggle for something good or evil. But the classifications do no longer function.
During the last years the internet opened up a new source for racism as it can be difficult to find the person who gave a certain message into the net. The anarchy of the internet provides racists with a lot of possibilities to reach people which they do not possess in other media, for legal and other reasons.

In the 1980s racist groups used mailboxes to communicate on an international level; the first ones to do so were supposedly the Ku Klux Klan and mailboxes like the Aryan Nations Liberty Net. In the meantime those mailboxes can be found in the internet. In 1997 about 600 extreme right websites were in the net, the number is growing, most of them coming from the USA. The shocking element is not the number of racist pages, because still it is a very small number compared to the variety of millions of pages one can find in this media, it is the evidence of intentional disinformation, the language and the hatred that makes it dangerous.
A complete network of anti-racist organizations, including a high number of websites are fighting against racism. For example:

http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x32/xr3257.html

http://www.aranet.org/

http://www.freespeech.org/waronracism/files/allies.htm
http://www.nsdapmuseum.com
http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Racism.asp

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Edward Herman

Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus in Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Author of several books like The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader or Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (he wrote that book - and others - together with Noam Chomsky).

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Kessler Marketing Intelligence (KMI)

KMI is the leading source for information on fiber-optics markets. It offers market research, strategic analysis and product planning services to the opto-electronics and communications industries. KMI tracks the worldwide fiber-optic cable system and sells the findings to the industry. KMI says that every fiber-optics corporation with a need for strategic market planning is a subscriber to their services.

http://www.kmicorp.com/

http://www.kmicorp.com/
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Yakima

YAKIMA, USA

Latitude: 46.592633, Longitude: -120.528908

The Yakima Research Station was established in the early 1970s inside the 100,000-hectare United States Army Yakima Firing Center, 200 kilometers south-east

of Seattle. The facility, located between the Saddle Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills, initially consisted of a long operations building and a single large dish pointing

west to enable collection against the Pacific Intelsat satellite. By 1995 the Yakima station had expanded to five dish antennae, three facing west to the Pacific and two, including the original large 1970s dish, facing east. In addition to the original operations building several newer buildings had been added, the largest a two-story windowless concrete structure. The Yakima station has been monitoring Pacific Intelsat communications since it opened, and also monitors the Pacific Ocean area Inmarsat-2 satellite.

Source: http://www.fas.org/irp/facility/yakima.htm

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