Coincidence Theory Meets Advanced Information Warfare – Updated
By James Heddle By Mary Beth Brangan
Coincidence Theory – The belief that world historical events ‘just happen’ without the conscious intentions, planning or purpossful interventions of any powerful, contending groups of organized actors. Any other analysis, however evidence based, is easily dismissed by labeling it with the critical thought stopping, CIA-generated term of art, ‘conspiracy theory.’ This naïve, dis-empowering cognitive error has serious existential implications.
“A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him, is always weaker than the person committing the violence.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Mapping and Navigating the New 21st Century ‘Influence Landscape’
Our topic today is the public mind and current social media landscape as the ‘battlespace’ for information ‘warfighters’ – or, the internet as a minefield of the mind.
Below is a list of concepts that may not be familiar to most of us, but that are the stock-in-trade, everyday vocabulary of the influencers who are working to influence us 24/7. ‘Influencing’ is a growth industry,
Getting familiar with their terms of art seems like a first step in empowering ourselves for effective, informed, citizen resistance. Why should the Globalists have a monopoly on all the latest slick concepts? Perhaps we Planetarian Ecohumanists can co-opt and adapt them for our own self-defense. At the very least, awareness is empowerment – forewarned is forearmed.
[ Despair Not Planetarian Ecohumanists! – In our next PP Blog we’ll report on the exciting, encouraging and empowering emergence of examples of informed resistance that we’re seeing from the local, regional, national and international levels!
Meanwhile, here’s the list of mind-warfare concepts:
Advanced Propaganda Methods
Perception Management
Neurobiological Narrative Framing
Influence Operations
Social Cognition Manipulation
Predictive Programming
Automated Discourse Analysis
Persistent Surveillance
Big Data Mining
Population Monitoring
Strategic Multilayer Assessment
Disruptive Technology Deployment
Tabletop Simulations
Irregular Warfare
Counter Network Warfare – “It takes a network to fight a network.”
If most of these terms and concepts are unfamiliar, the following sources will help unpack and illustrate them in operation for those who are interested. The really encouraging take-home from all this is that “the information revolution can cut both ways – Information fuels empowerment on every side of an issue.”
As the Info Warfighters have discovered, “It takes a network to fight a network.”
The Seamless Web of Public-Private Integration
‘The definition of fascism is The marriage of corporation and state ‘ – Benito Mussolini
Author Naomi Wolff identifies the declaration of ’emergency powers’ as the sure sign that a government has reached ‘step ten’ in her 10 steps to fascism.
First in our series is this pair of articles via The Defender.
How the CIA and the NSA Made Google
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet – Part 1
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet – Part 2
by Nafeez Ahmed
INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’
The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to transform the US military into Skynet.
Like Yasha Leviine’s Surveillance Valley and Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, this two part series of investigative journalism on the origins of Google delineates the seamless web of connections between the defense, intelligence and big tech ‘communities’, their quest for ‘information dominance,’ and the information environment we now inhabit.
According to author Nafeez Ahmed, that quest for control – despite its roster of powerful players and institutions – has so far not been fully successful.
Ahmed concludes, “This investigation is based entirely on open source techniques, made viable largely in the context of the same information revolution that enabled Google. The investigation has been funded entirely by members of the public, through crowd-funding. And the investigation has been published and distributed outside the circuits of traditional media, precisely to make the point that in this new digital age, centralized top-down concentrations of power cannot overcome the power of people, their love of truth and justice, and their desire to share….
“And this story, like so many before it, is one small sign that the opportunities to mobilize the information revolution for the benefit of all, despite the efforts of power to hide in the shadows, are stronger than ever.”
Don’t reset us…We’ll reset YOU….
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Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle co-direct EON, the Ecological Options Network. The EON feature documentary SHUTDOWN - The San Onofre Syndrome on the challenges of nuclear waste management will be released next year.