Jihad in a social media age: how can the west win an online war?
 

Jihad in a social media age: how can the west win an online war?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...war?CMP=twt_gu

As ISIS (IS) wages their battle inside of Iraq and Syria. ISIS plans a Social-Media Battle with West? Well, I will say they do have a PR (IO) and Recruitment campaign via Tweeter and other Regional Social Media Sites.

Is this Something the U.S. IC and Military should care about?

See, that is mastery of the Art.

We don't shoot him, we get his brothers or the locals to do it for us.

We just provide the motivation and information they need to do so.

"Brother, I saw on YouTube that you are an agent of the CIA and you have betrayed us!"

TR

Consistent with some observations here...
 

Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Okie IMO Pentagon and any Administration will never adapt or accept UW. I can tell you just like in AFG they will always call is FID. What we are doing inside of Iraq currently is FID. U.S. Military Forces are helping the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) by Training, Assisting and Advising them to combat this ISIS element(s) inside their country. I wish SF Groups and Battalions and ODA would view what they are doing as UW without it being told to them. But that is NOT the case. I lived it and got pissed at my leadership for having conventional goggles on.

Now back to topic. As Snowden showed America, it is very easy to “follow” you online. To “looking” at anyone’s “Tweets” (Twits) on Twiter is easy with COT social media visualization tools like NodeXL and Gephi.

Yet the issue is IMO, we as Americans can’t think on their level. Yes we can say we can, but IMO we cannot. This plays to conducting a Social Media IO campaign, you can hire people to read Tweets (Twits) or SM Posts on an Islamic SM Sites. But truly knowing what they think, their faith, their motivations, etc all play into this IO Campaign. The other issue IMO is leadership not understanding SM and knowing how to use it. Even if you get some hacker (25D/35Q) or young MISO (SMART) person to “clue” in the leadership, the leadership still doesn’t get it. Yes you can hire people to translate what is written, but still IMO it would be hard to conduct a counter-OI Campaign on any Muslim movement like ISIS (IS).


Yes that should be the plan behind it all.

Don't know if anyone saw it, but Jester shut down a bunch of the sites that the ISIS folks were using, to the tune of 1.3 million users without a way to get their daily jihadi social media fix. Even if the govt agencies aren't doing anything, there are other folks that can and will (http://ladyliberty1885.com/2014/08/2...da-tango-down/).

Social media today is the equivalent of the airborne letter drop and AFN (Armed Forces Network - aka America Free Radio) of WWII. It should be as important to command leadership and PSYOPS as a weapon today as it was back then.

They have successfully used SM to rally the dissidents to the focal cause du jour of the day across the middle east and North Africa. As with all things the US is lagging behind the message and slow to use it as either a weapon of opportunity or a counter measure to change the intended purpose.

I like the way TR and Brush Okie are thinking but would add that using SM to set lethal traps of opportunity would also cause them to rethink its usefulness. I.e., clone ISIS or other known leadership accounts and send fighters into an ambush hook-line-sinker and see how useful it would be in the future - create doubt!

This is what gets me about ISIS. If how they can get Muslim converts to come to Iraq and fight from Western Countries. The U.S. has three of them. Two dead inside Iraq and one the FBI arrested in Washington state.

Islamic State Trains Aussies As Suicide Bombers

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/56423...m#.U_8YW_6KCSM

One thing that we found in AFG are the WiFi Mesh Networks. Cheaply made and effective for WiFi Communications and Connectivity.
These are populiar in developing countries becuase how cost effective they are.

How To Build A Low-Cost “Wi-Fi Mesh Network” For Emergency Communication

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3020680/ho...-communication

MG - I think the message is easy right now because of all the perceived unrest in the world. It's easy to target western values and promote religious intolerance and hatred against those western values. If you build it they will come; in this case if you preach it they will flock to your cause. Hope really is lost on the hopeless.

On the second part - COMCAST would happily assist them with creating a seamless WIFI network tapping into paying customers with duplex routers. :mad:

Fantastic point. It's comes with being an * - American!

Sounds as if their J6 has a plan or two.

ISIS Displaying a Deft Command of Varied Media
NYT, 30 Aug 2014

The extremists who have seized large parts of Syria and Iraq have riveted the world’s attention with their military prowess and unrestrained brutality. But Western intelligence services are also worried about their extraordinary command of seemingly less lethal weapons: state-of-the-art videos, ground images shot from drones and multilingual Twitter messages.

ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is using every contemporary mode of messaging to recruit fighters, intimidate enemies and promote its claim to have established a caliphate, a unified Muslim state run according to a strict interpretation of Islamic law. If its bigotry and beheadings seem to come from a distant century, its use of media is up to the moment.

A review of its prodigious output in print and online reveals a number of surprises. ISIS propaganda, for instance, has strikingly few calls for attacks on the West, even though its most notorious video, among Americans, released 12 days ago, showed the beheading of the American journalist James Foley, threatened another American hostage, and said that American attacks on ISIS “would result in the bloodshed” of Americans. This diverged from nearly all of ISIS’s varied output, which promotes its paramount goal: to secure and expand the Islamic state. Experts say that could change overnight, but for now it sharply distinguishes ISIS from Al Qaeda, which has long made attacks on the West its top priority.

Cont'd http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/wo...edia.html?_r=0

The attchd image is an ISIS annual report of its military operations by type and number carried out, a part of its SM strategy.

And so it goes...

Richard

Twitter, Instagram, youtube and liveleak are all US controlled companies. Hard for ISIS to pimp their message if we deny them the outlet to do so.

Better that we have control than for them to find one housed outside the US.

I'm sure they're already posting their garbage out there but the corporations I mentioned have far more eyeballs on them than any other social media out there. No need to let them have the largest possible audience.