Movies as a Propaganda- and Disinformation-Tool in World War I and II Movies produced in Hollywood in 1918/19 were mainly anti-German. They had some influence but the bigger effect was reached in World War II-movies. The first propaganda movie of World War II was British. At that time all films had to pass censoring. Most beloved were entertaining movies with propaganda messages. The enemy was shown as a beast, an animal-like creature, a brutal person without soul and as an idiot. Whereas the own people were the heroes. That was the new form of atrocity. Leni Riefenstahl was a genius in this respect. Her movies still have an incredible power, while the majority of the other movies of that time look ridiculous today. The combination of light and shadow, the dramatic music and the mass-scenes that resembled ballet, had its effect and political consequences. Some of the German movies of that period still are on the index. U.S.-President Theodore Roosevelt considered movies the best propaganda-instrument, as they are more subtle than other tools. In the late twenties, movies got more and more important, in the USSR, too, like Sergei Eisenstein demonstrated with his movies. Historic events were changed into symbolism, exactly the way propaganda should function. It was disinformation - but in its most artistic form, especially in comparison to most U.S.- and European movies of that time.

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The Privatization of Censorship According to a still widely held conviction, the global data networks constitute the long desired arena for uncensorable expression. This much is true: Because of the Net it has become increasingly difficult to sustain cultural and legal standards. Geographical proximity and territorial boundaries prove to be less relevant, when it does not affect a document's availability if it is stored on your desktop or on a host some thousand kilometers away. There is no international agreement on non-prohibited contents, so human rights organizations and nazi groups alike can bypass restrictions. No single authority or organization can impose its rules and standards on all others. This is why the Net is public space, a political arena where free expression is possible. This freedom is conditioned by the design of the Net. But the Net's design is not a given, as Lawrence Lessig reminds us. Originally the design of the Net allowed a relatively high degree of privacy and communication was not controlled directly. But now this design is changing and this invisible agora in electronic space is endangered. Governments - even elected ones - and corporations introduce new technologies that allow us to be identified, monitored and tracked, that identify and block content, and that can allow our behaviour to be efficiently controlled. When the World Wide Web was introduced, soon small independent media and human rights organizations began to use this platform for drawing worldwide attention to their publications and causes. It seemed to be the dawning of a new era with authoritarian regimes and multinational media corporations on the looser side. But now the Net's design is changing according to their needs. "In every context that it can, the entertaining industry is trying to force the Internet into its own business model: the perfect control of content. From music (fighting MP3) and film (fighting the portability of DVD) to television, the industry is resisting the Net's original design. It was about the free flow of content; Hollywood wants perfect control instead" (Lawrence Lessig, Cyberspace Prosecutor, in: The Industry Standard, February 2000). In the United States, Hollywood and AT&T, after its merger with MediaOne becoming the biggest US cable service provider, return to their prior positions in the Seventies: the control of content and infrastructure. If most people will access the Net via set up boxes connected to a TV set, it will become a kind of television, at least in the USA. For small independent media it will become very hard to be heard, especially for those offering streaming video and music. Increasingly faster data transmissions just apply to download capacities; upload capacities are much - on the average about eight times - lower than download capacities. As an AT&T executive said in response to criticism: "We haven't built a 56 billion dollar cable network to have the blood sucked from our veins" (Lawrence Lessig, The Law in the Code: How the Net is Regulated, Lecture at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, May 29th, 2000). Consumers, not producers are preferred. For corporations what remains to be done to control the Net is mainly to cope with the fact that because of the Net it has become increasingly difficult to sustain cultural and legal standards. On Nov 11, 1995 the German prosecuting attorney's office searched Compuserve Germany, the branch of an international Internet service provider, because the company was suspected of having offered access to child pornography. Consequently Compuserve blocked access to more than 200 newsgroups, all containing "sex" or "gay" in their names, for all its customers. But a few days later, an instruction for access to these blocked newsgroups via Compuserve came into circulation. On February 26, 1997, Felix Somm, the Chief Executive Officer of Compuserve Germany, was accused of complicity with the distribution of child and animal pornography in newsgroups. In May 1998 he received a prison sentence for two years. This sentence was suspended against a bail of about 51.000 Euro. The sentence was justified by pointing to the fact that Compuserve Germany offered access to its US parent company's servers hosting child pornography. Felix Somm was held responsible for access to forbidden content he could not know of. (For further information (in German) click here.) Also in 1995, as an attack on US Vice-President Al Gore's intention to supply all public schools with Internet access, Republican Senator Charles Grassley warned of the lurking dangers for children on the Net. By referring to a Time magazine cover story by Philip Elmer-Dewitt from July 3 on pornography on the Net, he pointed out that 83,5% of all images online are pornographic. But Elmer-Dewitt was wrong. Obviously unaware of the difference between Bulletin Board Systems and the Net, he referred misleadingly to Marty Rimm's article Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway, published in the prestigious Georgetown Law Journal (vol. 83, June 1995, pp. 1849-1935). Rimm knew of this difference, of course, and stated it clearly. (For further information see Hoffman & Novak, The Cyberporn debate, http://ecommerce.vanderbilt.edu/cyberporn.debate.html and Franz Wegener, Cyberpornographie: Chronologie einer Hexenjagd; http://www.intro-online.de/c6.html) Almost inevitably anxieties accompany the introduction of new technologies. In the 19th century it was said that traveling by train is bad for health. The debate produced by Time magazine's cover story and Senator Grassley's attack caused the impression that the Net has multiplied possible dangers for children. The global communication networks seem to be a inexhaustible source of mushrooming child pornography. Later would-be bomb recipes found on the Net added to already prevailing anxieties. As even in industrialized countries most people still have little or no first-hand experience with the Net, anxieties about child pornography or terrorist attacks can be stirred up and employed easily. A similar and related debate is going on about the glorification of violence and erotic depictions in media. Pointing to a "toxic popular culture" shaped by media that "distort children's view of reality and even undermine their character growth", US right-wing social welfare organizations and think tanks call for strong media censorship. (See An Appeal to Hollywood, http://www.media-appeal.org/appeal.htm) Media, especially films and videos, are already censored and rated, so it is more censorship that is wanted. The intentions for stimulating a debate on child pornography on the Net were manifold: Inter alia, it served the Republican Party to attack Democrat Al Gore's initiative to supply all public schools with Internet access; additionally, the big media corporations realized that because of the Net they might have to face new competitors and rushed to press for content regulation. Taking all these intentions together, we can say that this still ongoing debate constitutes the first and most well known attempt to impose content regulation on the Net. Consequently, at least in Western countries, governments and media corporations refer to child pornography for justifying legal requirement and the implementation of technologies for the surveillance and monitoring of individuals, the filtering, rating and blocking of content, and the prohibition of anonymous publishing on the Net. In the name of "cleaning" the Net of child pornography, our basic rights are restricted. It is the insistence on unrestricted basic rights that needs to be justified, as it may seem. Underlying the campaign to control the Net are several assumptions. Inter alia: The Net lacks control and needs to be made safe and secure; we may be exposed inadvertently to pornographic content; this content is harmful to children. Remarkably, racism seems to be not an issue. The Net, especially the World Wide Web, is not like television (although it is to be feared this is what it might become like within the next years). Say, little Mary types "Barbie" in a search engine. Click here to see what happens. It is true, sometimes you might have the opportunity to see that pornography is just a few mouse clicks away, but it is not likely that you might be exposed to pornographic content unless you make deliberate mouse clicks. In reaction to these anxieties, but in absence of data how children use the Internet, the US government released the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in 1996. In consequence the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched the famous Blue Ribbon Campaign and, among others, America Online and Microsoft Corporation supported a lawsuit of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against this Act. On June 26, 1997, the US Supreme Court ruled the CDA as unconstitutional under the provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution: The Communications Decency Act violated the basic right to free expression. After a summit with the US government industry leaders announced the using of existing rating and blocking systems and the development of new ones for "inappropriate" online resources. So, after the failing of the CDA the US government has shifted its responsibility to the industry by inviting corporations to taking on governmental tasks. Bearing in the mind the CompuServe case and its possible consequences, the industry welcomed this decision and was quick to call this newly assumed responsibility "self-regulation". Strictly speaking, "self-regulation" as meant by the industry does not amount to the regulation of the behaviour of corporations by themselves. On the opposite, "self-regulation" is to be understood as the regulation of users' behaviour by the rating, filtering and blocking of Internet content considered being inappropriate. The Internet industry tries to show that technical solutions are more favourable than legislation und wants to be sure, not being held responsible and liable for illegal, offensive or harmful content. A new CompuServe case and a new Communications Decency Act shall be averted. In the Memorandum Self-regulation of Internet Content released in late 1999 by the Bertelsmann Foundation it is recommended that the Internet industry joins forces with governmental institutions for enforcing codes of conduct and encouraging the implementation of filters and ratings systems. For further details on the Memorandum see the study by the Center for Democracy and Technology, An Analysis of the Bertelsmann Foundation Memorandum on Self-Regulation of Internet Content: Concerns from a User Empowerment Perspective. In fact, the "self-regulation" of the Internet industry is privatized censorship performed by corporations and right-wing NGOs. Censorship has become a business. "Crucially, the lifting of restrictions on market competition hasn't advanced the cause of freedom of expression at all. On the contrary, the privatisation of cyberspace seems to be taking place alongside the introduction of heavy censorship." (Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology) While trying to convince us that its technical solutions are appropriate alternatives to government regulation, the Internet industry cannot dispense of governmental backing to enforce the proposed measures. This adds to and enforces the censorship measures already undertaken by governments. We are encouraged to use today's information and communication technologies, while the flow of information is restricted. According to a report by Reporters Sans Frontières, quoted by Leonard R. Sussman in his essay Censor Dot Gov. The Internet and Press Freedom 2000, the following countries totally or largely control Internet access: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

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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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World War II ... Never before propaganda had been as important as in the 2nd World War. From now on education was one more field of propaganda: its purpose was to teach how to think, while pure propaganda was supposed to show what to think. Every nation founded at least one ministry of propaganda - of course without calling it that way. For example the British called it the Ministry of Information (= MOI), the U.S. distinguished between the Office of Strategic Services (= OSS) and the Office of War Information (= OWI), the Germans created a Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment (= RMVP) and the Japanese called their disinformation and propaganda campaign the "Thought War". British censorship was so strict that the text of an ordinary propaganda leaflet, that had been dropped from planes several million times, was not given to a journalist who asked for it. Atrocity stories were no longer used the same way as in the 1st World War. Instead, black propaganda was preferred, especially to separate the Germans from their leaders. German war propaganda had started long before the war. In the middle of the 1930s Leni Riefenstahl filmed Hitler best propaganda movies. For the most famous one, "Triumph of the Will" (1935), she was the only professional filmier who was allowed to make close-up pictures of her admirer. Some of the pictures of fear, hatred and intolerance still exist in people's heads. Considering this propaganda did a good job, unfortunately it was the anti-national-socialist propaganda that failed at that time.

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1500 - 1700 A.D. 1588 Agostino Ramelli's reading wheel Agostino Ramelli designed a "reading wheel", which allowed browsing through a large number of documents without moving from one spot to another. The device presented a large number of books - a small library - laid open on lecterns on a kind of ferry-wheel. It allowed skipping chapters and browsing through pages by turning the wheel to bring lectern after lectern before the eyes. Ramelli's reading wheel thus linked ideas and texts and reminds of today's browsing software used to navigate the World Wide Web. 1597 The first newspaper is printed in Europe.

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Advertising Advertising as referred to in most economic books is part of the marketing mix. Therefore advertising usually is closely associated with the aim of selling products and services. Still, developments like "branding" show a tendency towards the marketing of not only products and services, but of ideas and values. While advertising activities are also pursued by political parties, politicians and governmental as well as non-governmental organizations, most of the money flowing into the advertising industry comes from corporations. Although these clients come from such diverse fields, their intentions hardly differ. Attempting to influence the public, their main goal is to sell: Products, services, ideas, values and (political) ideology.

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Timeline 1970-2000 AD 1971 IBM's work on the Lucifer cipher and the work of the NSA lead to the U.S. Data Encryption Standard (= DES) 1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman publish their book New Directions in Cryptography, playing with the idea of public key cryptography 1977/78 the RSA algorithm is developed by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman and is published 1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act - The Hacker Quarterly is founded 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is passed in the USA - Electronic Communications Privacy Act 1987 Chicago prosecutors found Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force 1988 U.S. Secret Service covertly videotapes a hacker convention 1989 NuPrometheus League distributes Apple Computer software 1990 - IDEA, using a 128-bit key, is supposed to replace DES - Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard publish their work on Quantum Cryptography - Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T long-distance network nationwide 1991 PGP (= Pretty Good Privacy) is released as freeware on the Internet, soon becoming worldwide state of the art; its creator is Phil Zimmermann - one of the first conferences for Computers, Freedom and Privacy takes place in San Francisco - AT&T phone crash; New York City and various airports get affected 1993 the U.S. government announces to introduce the Clipper Chip, an idea that provokes many political discussions during the following years 1994 Ron Rivest releases another algorithm, the RC5, on the Internet - the blowfish encryption algorithm, a 64-bit block cipher with a key-length up to 448 bits, is designed by Bruce Schneier 1990s work on quantum computer and quantum cryptography - work on biometrics for authentication (finger prints, the iris, smells, etc.) 1996 France liberates its cryptography law: one now can use cryptography if registered - OECD issues Cryptography Policy Guidelines; a paper calling for encryption exports-standards and unrestricted access to encryption products 1997 April European Commission issues Electronic Commerce Initiative, in favor of strong encryption 1997 June PGP 5.0 Freeware widely available for non-commercial use 1997 June 56-bit DES code cracked by a network of 14,000 computers 1997 August U.S. judge assesses encryption export regulations as violation of the First Amendment 1998 February foundation of Americans for Computer Privacy, a broad coalition in opposition to the U.S. cryptography policy 1998 March PGP announces plans to sell encryption products outside the USA 1998 April NSA issues a report about the risks of key recovery systems 1998 July DES code cracked in 56 hours by researchers in Silicon Valley 1998 October Finnish government agrees to unrestricted export of strong encryption 1999 January RSA Data Security, establishes worldwide distribution of encryption product outside the USA - National Institute of Standards and Technologies announces that 56-bit DES is not safe compared to Triple DES - 56-bit DES code is cracked in 22 hours and 15 minutes 1999 May 27 United Kingdom speaks out against key recovery 1999 Sept: the USA announce to stop the restriction of cryptography-exports 2000 as the German government wants to elaborate a cryptography-law, different organizations start a campaign against that law - computer hackers do no longer only visit websites and change little details there but cause breakdowns of entire systems, producing big economic losses for further information about the history of cryptography see: http://www.clark.net/pub/cme/html/timeline.html http://www.math.nmsu.edu/~crypto/Timeline.html http://fly.hiwaay.net/~paul/cryptology/history.html http://www.achiever.com/freehmpg/cryptology/hocryp.html http://all.net/books/ip/Chap2-1.html http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/enigma/eni-intro.htm http://www.achiever.com/freehmpg/cryptology/cryptofr.html http://www.cdt.org/crypto/milestones.shtml for information about hacker's history see: http://www.farcaster.com/sterling/chronology.htm:

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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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Association for Progressive Communication (APC) The APC is a global federation of 24 non-profit Internet providers serving over 50,000 NGOs in 133 countries. Since 1990, APC has been supporting people and organizations worldwide, working together online for social, environmental and economic justice. The APC's network of members and partners spans the globe, with significant presence in Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. History Between 1982 and 1987 several independent, national, non-profit computer networks emerged as viable information and communication resources for activists and NGOs. The networks were founded to make new communication techniques available to movements working for social change. In 1987, people at GreenNet in England began collaborating with their counterparts at the Institute for Global Communications (IGC) in the United States. These two networks started sharing electronic conference material and demonstrated that transnational electronic communications could serve international as well as domestic communities working for peace, human rights and the environment. This innovation proved so successful that by late 1989, networks in Sweden, Canada, Brazil, Nicaragua and Australia were exchanging information with each other and with IGC and GreenNet. In the spring of 1990, these seven organizations founded the Association for Progressive communications to co-ordinate the operation and development of this emerging global network of networks. Strategies and Policies The APC defends and promotes non-commercial, productive online space for NGOs and collaborates with like-minded organizations to ensure that the information and communication needs of civil society are considered in telecommunications, donor and investment policy. The APC is committed to freedom of expression and exchange of information on the Internet. The APC helps to build capacity between existing and emerging communication service providers. The APC Women's Networking Support Program promotes gender-aware Internet design, implementation and use. Through its African members, the APC is trying to strengthen indigenous information sharing and independent networking capacity on the continent. Members of APC develop Internet products, resources and tools to meet the advocacy, collaboration and information publishing and management needs of civil society. Recent APC initiatives have included the APC Toolkit Project: Online Publishing and Collaboration for Activists and the Mission-Driven Business Planning Toolkit. The APC also runs special projects like the Beijing+5, which shall enable non-governmental organizations to actively participate in the review of the Beijing Platform for Action.

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The North against the South? "Faced with this process of globalization, most governments appear to lack the tools required for facing up to the pressure from important media changes. The new global order is viewed as a daunting challenge, and it most often results in reactions of introversion, withdrawal and narrow assertions of national identity. At the same time, many developing countries seize the opportunity represented by globalization to assert themselves as serious players in the global communications market." (UNESCO, World Communication Report) The big hope of the South is that the Internet will close the education gap and economic gap, by making education easier to achieve. But in reality the gap is impossible to close, because the North is not keeping still, but developing itself further and further all the time; inventing new technologies that produce another gap each. The farmer's boy sitting in the dessert and using a cellular telephone and a computer at the same time is a sarcastic picture - nothing else. Still, the so called developing countries regard modern communication technologies as a tremendous chance - and actually: which other choice is there left?

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Economic structure; digital euphoria The dream of a conflict-free capitalism appeals to a diverse audience. No politician can win elections without eulogising the benefits of the information society and promising universal wealth through informatisation. "Europe must not lose track and should be able to make the step into the new knowledge and information society in the 21st century", said Tony Blair. The US government has declared the construction of a fast information infrastructure network the centerpiece of its economic policies In Lisbon the EU heads of state agreed to accelerate the informatisation of the European economies The German Chancellor Schröder has requested the industry to create 20,000 new informatics jobs. The World Bank understands information as the principal tool for third world development Electronic classrooms and on-line learning schemes are seen as the ultimate advance in education by politicians and industry leaders alike. But in the informatised economies, traditional exploitative practices are obscured by the glamour of new technologies. And the nearly universal acceptance of the ICT message has prepared the ground for a revival of 19th century "adapt-or-perish" ideology. "There is nothing more relentlessly ideological than the apparently anti-ideological rhetoric of information technology" (Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, media theorists)

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Introduction: The Substitution of Human Faculties with Technology: Computers and Robots With the development of modern computing, starting in the 1940s, the substitution of human abilities with technology obtained a new dimension. The focus shifted from the replacement of pure physical power to the substitution of mental faculties. Following the early 1980s personal computers started to attain widespread use in offices and quickly became indispensable tools for office workers. The development of powerful computers combined with progresses in artificial intelligence research also led to the construction of sophisticated robots, which enabled a further rationalization of manufacturing processes.

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Content as Transport Medium for Values and Ideologies With the dissemination of their content commercial media are among other things also able to transport values and ideologies. Usually their programming reflects society's dominant social, political, ethical, cultural and economical values. A critical view of the prevalent ideologies often is sacrificed so as not to offend the existing political elites and corporate powers, but rather satisfy shareholders and advertisers. With most of the worlds content produced by a few commercial media conglomerates, with the overwhelming majority of companies (in terms of revenue generation) concentrated in Europe, the U.S., Japan and Australia there is also a strong flow of content from the 'North-West' to the 'South-East'. Popular culture developed in the world's dominant commercial centers and Western values and ideologies are so disseminated into the most distant corners of the earth with far less coming back.

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History: Communist Tradition Following the communist revolutions of the 20th century all "means of production" became the property of the state as representative of "the masses". Private property ceased to exist. While moral rights of the creator were recognized and economic rights acknowledged with a one-time cash award, all subsequent rights reverted to the state. With the transformation of many communist countries to a market system most of them have now introduced laws establishing markets in intellectual property rights. Still the high rate of piracy reflects a certain lack of legal tradition.

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Late 1960s - Early 1970s: Third Generation Computers One of the most important advances in the development of computer hardware in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the invention of the integrated circuit, a solid-state device containing hundreds of transistors, diodes, and resistors on a tiny silicon chip. It made possible the production of large-scale computers (mainframes) of higher operating speeds, capacity, and reliability at significantly lower costs. Another type of computer developed at the time was the minicomputer. It profited from the progresses in microelectronics and was considerably smaller than the standard mainframe, but, for instance, powerful enough to control the instruments of an entire scientific laboratory. Furthermore operating systems, that allowed machines to run many different programs at once with a central program that monitored and coordinated the computer's memory, attained widespread use.

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1940s - Early 1950s: First Generation Computers Probably the most important contributor concerning the theoretical basis for the digital computers that were developed in the 1940s was Alan Turing, an English mathematician and logician. In 1936 he created the Turing machine, which was originally conceived as a mathematical tool that could infallibly recognize undecidable propositions. Although he instead proved that there cannot exist any universal method of determination, Turing's machine represented an idealized mathematical model that reduced the logical structure of any computing device to its essentials. His basic scheme of an input/output device, memory, and central processing unit became the basis for all subsequent digital computers. The onset of the Second World War led to an increased funding for computer projects, which hastened technical progress, as governments sought to develop computers to exploit their potential strategic importance. By 1941 the German engineer Konrad Zuse had developed a computer, the Z3, to design airplanes and missiles. Two years later the British completed a secret code-breaking computer called Colossus to decode German messages and by 1944 the Harvard engineer Howard H. Aiken had produced an all-electronic calculator, whose purpose was to create ballistic charts for the U.S. Navy. Also spurred by the war the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), a general-purpose computer, was produced by a partnership between the U.S. government and the University of Pennsylvania (1943). Consisting of 18.000 vacuum tubes, 70.000 resistors and 5 million soldered joints, the computer was such a massive piece of machinery (floor space: 1,000 square feet) that it consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power, enough energy to dim lights in an entire section of a bigger town. Concepts in computer design that remained central to computer engineering for the next 40 years were developed by the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann in the mid-1940s. By 1945 he created the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) with a memory to hold both a stored program as well as data. The key element of the Neumann architecture was the central processing unit (CPU), which allowed all computer functions to be coordinated through a single source. One of the first commercially available computers to take advantage of the development of the CPU was the UNIVAC I (1951). Both the U.S. Census bureau and General Electric owned UNIVACs (Universal Automatic Computer). Characteristic for first generation computers was the fact, that instructions were made-to-order for the specific task for which the computer was to be used. Each computer had a different binary-coded program called a machine language that told it how to operate. Therefore computers were difficult to program and limited in versatility and speed. Another feature of early computers was that they used vacuum tubes and magnetic drums for storage.

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Changes Still, disinformation and propaganda are nothing magic. They can change things, but supposedly only if those things/meanings/opinions are not fixed completely. Galileo Galilee was not capable of changing people's opinion about the world being flat until some persons got suspicious that this long-believed-in truth was a mistake. The propaganda of his experiments which made him famous was not enough. On the other hand later all the propaganda of his enemies could not turn back the wheel of enlightenment, as people thought it was more logic to believe in a round world than in a flat one. It is never just a single idea that changes. Society is following the changes. Thinking about disinformation brings us to the word truth, of course, and to the doubt that there is no definite truth. And truth can easily be manipulated to another truth. Just present some facts that seem to be logic and there you've got a new truth. And if the facts can supposedly be proved by empirical studies then the quality of the truth definitely rises. That's what ideologies do all the time. And the media like to do the same thing - as a game with power or mere presentation of power? But of course there also exist bits of disinformation which are more amusing than evil or dangerous: - the theory of the celestro-centric world/"Hohlwelttheorie" - the story of the German philosopher who invented an Italian philosopher, wrote books about him, even reprinted "his" texts, which had gone lost pretendedly 100 years ago - and finally lost his job and all his career when other scientists found out that everything had been made up.

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Media Giants Online The following selection does not claim to present an exhaustive listing, but rather picks some of the company's most important assets. Due to the rapid developments in the world of media giants the list is also subject to changes. Broadcasting ABC TV Network with 223 affiliated TV stations covering the entire U.S. ABC Radio Network, with 2,900 affiliated stations throughout the U.S. Owner of 9 VHF TV stations Owner of 11 AM and 10 FM stations Cable TV Systems and Channels/Networks Disney Channel 80 % of ESPN cable TV channel and ESPN International 50 % of Lifetime cable TV channel Internet/Interactive Disney Interactive - entertainment and educational computer software and video games, plus development of content for on-line services. Partnership with 3 phone companies to provide video programming and interactive services. ABC Online TV Production, Movies, Video, Music Disney Television Production studios and Walt Disney Pictures movie studio Buena Vista Television production company Buena Vista Home Video Miramax and Touchstone movie production companies Buena Vista Pictures Distribution and Buena Vista International, distributors for Disney and Touchstone movies Walt Disney Records, and Hollywood Records Publishing 6 daily newspapers About 40 weekly magazines, including: Discover, Women's Wear Daily, Los Angeles and Institutional Investor. Chilton Publications Guilford Publishing Co. Hitchcock Publishing Co. Theme Parks, Resorts, and Travel Disneyland Disney World and Disney World Resort Part owner of Disneyland-Paris and Tokyo Disneyland 12 resort hotels Disney Vacation Club Cruise Lines International TV, Film, and Broadcasting 50 % owner of Tele-München Fernseh GmbH & Co. 50 % owner of RTL Disney Fernseh GmbH & Co. 23 % owner of RTL 2 Fernseh GmbH & Co. 37,5 % owner of TM3 Fernseh GmbH & Co. 20-33 % stake in Eurosport network, Spanish Tesauro SA TV company, and Scandinavian Broadcasting System SA 20 % owner of TVA Other Over 500 Disney Stores, and licensing of Disney products The Mighty Ducks professional hockey team 25 % ownership of California Angels major league baseball team Business Connections with Other Media Companies Joint ventures, equity interests, or major arrangements with Bertelsmann, TCI, Hearst Corp., Kirch, and various other media and telephone companies.

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The 2nd Chechnya-War In the summer of 1999 between 1.200 and 2.000 Muslim rebels from Chechnya fell into Dagestan. Rumors say that Russian soldiers closed their eyes pretending not to see anything. During the fightings that started soon, many persons got killed. The hole issue was blamed on Chechnya. At that time there were rumors that there would be heavy bombing in Moscow in September. And there was. Those two things together brought back the hatred against the Chechnya rebels. The 2nd War between Russia and the Muslim country began. While the first war was lost at home, because the Russians, especially mothers, did not understand why their sons should fight against Chechnya, this time the atmosphere was completely different. In the cities 85% and all over Russia 65% of the Russian population agreed with the war. This time the war was a national issue, a legitimate defense. The media emphasized this. Alexander Zilin, a journalist, found out that the truth was far from the one presented in the media: First of all there was no evidence that the Moscow-bombings were organized by Chechnyans. On the contrary it is more than probable that the crimes were organized by a governmental institution for national security. The disinformation was part of the strategy to make the population support another war with Chechnya. The media were part of the story, maybe without knowing. They kept on the government's and army's side, showing only special and patriotic parts of the war. For example the number of dead Russian soldiers was held back. The U.S.-behavior on this: The USA would like to intervene but they are afraid of ruining the weak relation to Russia. For years the main topic of U.S.-politics has been the struggle against terrorism. Now Russia pretends to be fighting terrorism. How could it be criticized for that? The reason for this war is rather cynical: it worked as a public relations-campaign for Vladimir Putin, candidate for the president's elections in. When Putin came into power as minister-president of Russia in August 1999, opinion polls gave him 2% for the elections in summer 2000. By the end of November he got already 46%! And finally he won. The public relations war worked well. At the same time a propaganda-campaign against his rival Y. Primakov (98), formerly the most popular candidate, was spreading lies and bad rumors. Opinion-polls showed very fast that he had lost the elections because of this black propaganda, even before the elections took place.

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Cartoons Cartoons' technique is simplicity. Images are easier to remember than texts. Frequently they show jokes about politicians, friendly or against the person shown. In the first decades of this century, cartoons were also used for propaganda against artists; remember the famous cartoons of Oscar Wilde being portrayed as a criminal, aiming to destroy his popularity. As a tool in politics it had fatal consequences by determining stereotypes, which never again could be erased even if detected as pure disinformation. Most famous got the cartoons about Jews, which were not only distributed by Germans and Austrians but all over Europe; and already in the tens and twenties of our century. Most horrifying is the fact that many of those old, fascist and racist cartoons are coming back now, in slightly different design only.

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The Kosovo-Crisis During the Kosovo Crisis and during the war that followed, and probably also after it, all sides of the conflict were manipulating their people and others as well, whenever they could. Some of the propaganda shown on TV was as primitive as in World War II, others were subtler. This propaganda started by telling the history of the geographic point of discussion from the own point of view, it went on with the interpretation of the motives of the enemy and finally came to censorship, manipulation of the number of victims ( for more information see: http://www.oneworld.org/index_oc/kosovo/kadare.html , spreading of atrocity stories and so on. Many journalists and scientists are still working to detect more propaganda and disinformation stories. An interesting detail about this war was that more people than ever before took their information about the war out of the internet. In part this had to do with the biased TV-reports on all sides. All parties put their ideas and perspectives in the net, so one could get an overview of the different thoughts and types of disinformation. One of the big lies of NATO was the numbers of destroyed military facilities in Serbia. After the war the numbers had to be corrected down to a ridiculous number of about 13 destroyed tanks. At the same time the numbers of civilian victims turned out to be much higher than NATO had admitted in the first line. The method how European and American people had been persuaded to support the NATO-bombings was the promise to bomb only targets of the military or military-related facilities. Nearly every day NATO had to stretch this interpretation, as many civilian houses got destroyed. A cynical word was created for this kind of excuse: collateral damage. The Serbs were not better than Western governments and media, which worked together closely. Serb TV showed the bombed targets and compared persons like Bill Clinton to Adolf Hitler and called the NATO fascist. On the other hand pictures from the situation in Kosov@ were left out in their reports. More: http://www.voa.gov/editorials/08261.htm (91) http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/progresp/vol3/prog3n22.html (92) http://www.serbia-info.com/news (93) http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/Belgrade041399.html (94) http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1999/08/SAID/12320.html (95)

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The Post-World-War II-period After World War II the importance of propaganda still increased, on the commercial level as well as on a political level, in the era of the Cold War. The propaganda institutions of the different countries wanted their people to think the right way, which meant, the national way. In the USA the McCarthy-era started, a totalitarian system in struggle against communism. McCarthy even managed to publicly burn critical books that were written about him; and every unbeloved artist was said to be a communist, an out-law. Cold War brought the era of spies with it, which was the perfect tool of disinformation. But the topic as a movie-genre seems still popular today, as the unchanged success of James Bond-movies show. A huge net of propaganda was built up for threatening with the nuclear bomb: pretending that the enemy was even more dangerous than the effect of such a bomb. And later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, disinformation found other fields of work, like the wars of the 1990s showed us.

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Disinformation and Science Disinformation's tools emerged from science and art. And furthermore: disinformation can happen in politics of course, but also in science: for example by launching ideas which have not been proven exactly until the moment of publication. e.g. the thought that time runs backwards in parts of the universe: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19991127/newsstory3.html

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Philip M. Taylor Munitions of the Mind. A history of propaganda from the ancient world to the present era. Manchester 1995 (2nd ed.) This book gives a quite detailed insight on the tools and tasks of propaganda in European and /or Western history. Starting with ancient times the author goes up till the Gulf War and the meaning of propaganda today. In all those different eras propaganda was transporting similar messages, even when technical possibilities had not been fairly as widespread as today. Taylor's book is leading the reader through those different periods, trying to show the typical elements of each one.

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RIPE The RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) is one of three Regional Internet Registries (RIR), which exist in the world today, providing allocation and registration services which support the operation of the Internet globally, mainly the allocation of IP address space for Europe. http://www.ripe.net

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Sperry Formerly (1955 - 1979) Sperry Rand Corporation, American corporation that merged with the Burroughs Corporation in 1986 to form Unisys Corporation, a large computer manufacturer.

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Amazon.Com Amazon.Com was one of the first online bookstores. With thousands of books, CDs and videos ordered via the Internet every year, Amazon.Com probably is the most successful Internet bookstore.

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AT&T AT&T Corporation provides voice, data and video communications services to large and small businesses, consumers and government entities. AT&T and its subsidiaries furnish domestic and international long distance, regional, local and wireless communications services, cable television and Internet communications services. AT&T also provides billing, directory and calling card services to support its communications business. AT&T's primary lines of business are business services, consumer services, broadband services and wireless services. In addition, AT&T's other lines of business include network management and professional services through AT&T Solutions and international operations and ventures. In June 2000, AT&T completed the acquisition of MediaOne Group. With the addition of MediaOne's 5 million cable subscribers, AT&T becomes the country's largest cable operator, with about 16 million customers on the systems it owns and operates, which pass nearly 28 million American homes. (source: Yahoo) Slogan: "It's all within your reach" Business indicators: Sales 1999: $ 62.391 bn (+ 17,2 % from 1998) Market capitalization: $ 104 bn Employees: 107,800 Corporate website: http://www.att.com http://www.att.com/

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William Frederick Friedman Friedman is considered the father of U.S.-American cryptoanalysis - he also was the one to start using this term.

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John Dee b. July 13, 1527, London, England d. December 1608, Mortlake, Surrey English alchemist, astrologer, and mathematician who contributed greatly to the revival of interest in mathematics in England. After lecturing and studying on the European continent between 1547 and 1550, Dee returned to England in 1551 and was granted a pension by the government. He became astrologer to the queen, Mary Tudor, and shortly thereafter was imprisoned for being a magician but was released in 1555. Dee later toured Poland and Bohemia (1583-89), giving exhibitions of magic at the courts of various princes. He became warden of Manchester College in 1595.

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Europe Online Established in 1998 and privately held, Europe Online created and operates the world's largest broadband "Internet via the Sky" network. The Europe Online "Internet via the Sky" service is available to subscribers in English, French, German, Dutch and Danish with more languages to come. http://www.europeonline.com

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Slobodan Milosevic Slobodan Milosevic (* 1941) is a Serbian political leader. As a young man S. Milosevic joined the Communist Party, in 1984 the banker became head of the local Communist Party of Belgrade, in 1987 head of the Serb CP. Since 1989 he has been president of Serbia (since 1997 president of the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). During his reign the Yugoslav Republic broke up, bringing about the independence of Slovenia and Croatia and the war in Bosnia. In 1998 the Kosovo Crisis started.

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Binary number system In mathematics, the term binary number system refers to a positional numeral system employing 2 as the base and requiring only two different symbols, 0 and 1. The importance of the binary system to information theory and computer technology derives mainly from the compact and reliable manner in which data can be represented in electromechanical devices with two states--such as "on-off," "open-closed," or "go-no go."

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National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation (NASDAQ) Incepted in 1971, The NASDAQ Stock Market was the world's first electronic stock market and has since attracted many technology companies from countries all over the world, some of them as legendary as Apple, Inc. and Microsoft, Inc., e.g., to go public. NASDAQ is the largest stock market in the world. http://www.nasdaq.com http://www.nasdaq.com/

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Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) is a standard reference model for communication between two end users in a network. It is used in developing products and understanding networks. Source: Whatis.com

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Braille Universally accepted system of writing used by and for blind persons and consisting of a code of 63 characters, each made up of one to six raised dots arranged in a six-position matrix or cell. These Braille characters are embossed in lines on paper and read by passing the fingers lightly over the manuscript. Louis Braille, who was blinded at the age of three, invented the system in 1824 while a student at the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles (National Institute for Blind Children), Paris.

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Internet Engineering Steering Group On behalf of the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Steering Group is responsible for the technical management of the evolution of the architecture, the standards and the protocols of the Net. http://www.ietf.org/iesg.html http://www.ietf.org/iesg.html

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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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Enigma Device used by the German military command to encode strategic messages before and during World War II. The Enigma code was broken by a British intelligence system known as Ultra.

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Boris Yeltsin Boris Yeltsin was Russian President until the end of 1999. After many years of work for the Communist Party, he joined the Politburo in 1986. His sharp critique on Mikhail Gorbachev forced that one to resign. Yeltsin won the 1990 election into Russian presidency and quit the Communist Party. Quarrels with the Parliament could not destroy his popularity until the secession war with Chechnya. When the Russian economy collapsed in 1998, he dismissed his entire government. In the end the sick old man of Russian politics had lost all his popularity as a president and resigned for the benefit of his political son Vladimir Putin.

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McCarthy Born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy graduated from Marquette in 1935. In 1939, he won election as a circuit court judge. During World War II, he enlisted in the Marines and served in the Pacific. In 1944, he campaigned for senator but lost in the Republican primary. In 1946, he ran for Wisconsin's other senate seat. In a 1950 speech, McCarthy entered the public spotlight by claiming that communists had "infested" the State Department, dramatically waving a sheet of paper which purportedly contained the traitors' names. A special Senate committee investigated the charges and found them groundless. Unfazed, McCarthy used his position to wage a relentless anti-communist crusade, denouncing numerous public figures and holding a series of highly confrontational hearings, ruining the careers of many people. He died at the age of 49 of complications related to alcoholism. http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/bios/31.html http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/bios/31.ht...

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David Kahn David Kahn can be considered one of the most important historians on cryptography. His book The Codebreakers. The comprehensive history of secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet, written in 1996 is supposed to be the most important work on the history of cryptography.

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Enochian alphabet Also "Angelic" language. Archaic language alphabet composed of 21 letters, discovered by John Dee and his partner Edward Kelley. It has its own grammar and syntax, but only a small sample of it has ever been translated to English.

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Black Propaganda Black propaganda does not tell its source. The recipient cannot find out the correct source. Rather would it be possible to get a wrong idea about the sender. It is very helpful for separating two allies.

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Scientology Official name Church Of Scientology, religio-scientific movement developed in the United States in the 1950s by the author L. Ron Hubbard (1911-86). The Church of Scientology was formally established in the United States in 1954 and was later incorporated in Great Britain and other countries. The scientific basis claimed by the church for its diagnostic and therapeutic practice is disputed, and the church has been criticized for the financial demands that it makes on its followers. From the 1960s the church and various of its officials or former officials faced government prosecutions as well as private lawsuits on charges of fraud, tax evasion, financial mismanagement, and conspiring to steal government documents, while the church on the other hand claimed it was being persecuted by government agencies and by established medical organizations. Some former Scientology officials have charged that Hubbard used the tax-exempt status of the church to build a profitable business empire.

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Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky (* 1928) works as a U.S.-linguist, writer, political activist and journalist. He is teaching at the MIT (= Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as a professor of linguistics, specializing on structural grammar and the change of language through technology and economy - and the social results of that. When he stood up against the Vietnam War he became famous as a "radical leftist". Since then he has been one of the most famous critics of his country.

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Bandwidth The bandwidth of a transmitted communications signal is a measure of the range of frequencies the signal occupies. The term is also used in reference to the frequency-response characteristics of a communications receiving system. All transmitted signals, whether analog or digital, have a certain bandwidth. The same is true of receiving systems. Generally speaking, bandwidth is directly proportional to the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. In a qualitative sense, bandwidth is proportional to the complexity of the data for a given level of system performance. For example, it takes more bandwidth to download a photograph in one second than it takes to download a page of text in one second. Large sound files, computer programs, and animated videos require still more bandwidth for acceptable system performance. Virtual reality (VR) and full-length three-dimensional audio/visual presentations require the most bandwidth of all. In digital systems, bandwidth is data speed in bits per second (bps). Source: Whatis.com

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Proxy Servers A proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary between a workstation user and the Internet so that security, administrative control, and caching service can be ensured. A proxy server receives a request for an Internet service (such as a Web page request) from a user. If it passes filtering requirements, the proxy server, assuming it is also a cache server, looks in its local cache of previously downloaded Web pages. If it finds the page, it returns it to the user without needing to forward the request to the Internet. If the page is not in the cache, the proxy server, acting as a client on behalf of the user, uses one of its own IP addresses to request the page from the server out on the Internet. When the page is returned, the proxy server relates it to the original request and forwards it on to the user. Source: Whatis.com

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International Standardization Organization ISO (International Organization for Standardization), founded in 1946, is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from some 100 countries, one from each country. Among the standards it fosters is Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), a universal reference model for communication protocols. Many countries have national standards organizations that participate in and contribute to ISO standards making. http://www.iso.ch Source: Whatis.com http://www.iso.ch/

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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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Virtual Private Networks Virtual Private Networks provide secured connections to a corporate site over a public network as the Internet. Data transmitted through secure connections are encrypted and therefore have to be encrypted before they can be read. These networks are called virtual because connections are provided only when you connect to a corporate site; they do not rely on dedicated lines and support mobile use.

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Louis Braille b. Jan. 4, 1809, Coupvray, near Paris, France d. Jan. 6, 1852, Paris, France Educator who developed a system of printing and writing that is extensively used by the blind and that was named for him. Himself blind Braille became interested in a system of writing, exhibited at the school by Charles Barbier, in which a message coded in dots was embossed on cardboard. When he was 15, he worked out an adaptation, written with a simple instrument, that met the needs of the sightless. He later took this system, which consists of a six-dot code in various combinations, and adapted it to musical notation. He published treatises on his type system in 1829 and 1837.

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Amazon.com Amazon.com is an online shop that serves approx. 17 mn customers in 150 countries. Starting out as a bookshop, Amazon today offers a wide range of other products as well. Among privacy campaigners, the company's name has become almost synonymous with aggressive online direct marketing practices as well as user profiling and tracking. Amazon and has been involved in privacy disputes at numerous occasions. http://www.amazon.com/ http://www.computeruser.com/newstoday/00/01/0...

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Immanuel Wallerstein Immanuel Wallerstein (* 1930) is director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations. He is one of the most famous sociologists in the Western World. With his book The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (1976), which led to the expression World-System Theory about centers, peripheries and semi-peripheries in the capitalist world system, he did not only influence a whole generation of scientists, but this theory seems to get popular again, due to globalization.

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