Blake Hall
The weapon that will eliminate ISIS is an app on your phone.
That’s according to Kalev H. Leetaru, a senior fellow at George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security council member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government (a mouthful, huh?)
The plan is basically a psychological ops campaign that’s founded on this indisputable fact: ISIS needs social media to sustain its force and recruit more young brain-washable scum. Leetaru’s strategy is to “troll” this process, in the same way China or Russia run their evil yet strangely effective oppressive propaganda machines.
In lieu of blocking one of their Twitter feeds (the current and largely ineffective approach) you jam it up with a whole bunch of crap that dilutes their real message. Sounds good, right?
Here’s Leetaru attack, spelled out via himself:
China and Russia learned long ago that simply censoring objectionable material does not work. Instead, the United States could flood the online environment with an overwhelming volume of counter-narratives that simply drown out all other voices. The Chinese propaganda machine, for instance, employs over 300,000 people, including over a quarter-milliononline commentators, whose job is to saturate the web with Beijing-friendly material, while encouraging self-censorship through high-volume character attacks against users posting objectionable material. Russia employs a similar model to control domestic Internet conversation. It adds an offensive element, via propaganda campaigns that spread panic-inciting, false reports of industrial accidents, pandemic outbreaks, and other calamities across the United States.
Imagine if we used a similar approach against the Islamic State. Each time Twitter suspended one of its accounts — let’s use the fictitious @ISISSupporter as an example — the U.S. government could register a thousand new ones, using every conceivable variation of the original user name, designed to appear identical to the suspended account, with handles like @ISISSupporter2, @ISISSupporter3, @SupporterOfISIS, and so on. Each account would claim to be the true reincarnation of the original.
When the real Islamic State user finally registers a new account, the U.S.-registered accounts would go on the offensive, tweeting claims that the real account is a phony designed to ensnare sympathizers. Other accounts would be set up to look like official Islamic State recruiter accounts, posting genuine Islamic State material. But the “recruiters” operating those accounts would, in reality, be government agents lurking in encrypted chat rooms, sending links that redirect the user’s browser to location-tracing malware.
In conjunction, U.S. cyber warriors would upload hundreds of thousands of videos to YouTube and similar platforms. The first few seconds would be lifted from an Islamic State video to ensure that their thumbnail and preview appear legitimate, while the rest would present a counter narrative or be blank. Links to these fake videos would be tweeted in the same fashion that the Islamic State tweets its own videos, effectively drowning legitimate videos in a sea of fake ones. Simultaneously, every Twitter hashtag and meme posted by the Islamic State would be met with a barrage of tens of millions of counter messages, crowding out pro-Islamic State sentiments. A non-stop barrage of false messages would post claims of battlefield failures, defections, and drone strikes, overwhelming positive news and inciting local panic. The end result would be an environment where would-be Islamic State supporters and fighters could no longer distinguish between what was real and what was illusion, or who and what to trust — “a wilderness of mirrors,” to borrow the words of the former head of U.S. counterintelligence.