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Old 11-28-2013, 12:35   #10
Peregrino
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Occupied Pineland
Posts: 4,701
Quote:
Originally Posted by MtnGoat View Post
--- I see social media as a great tool for us to be using, exploiting, analyzing and collecting from. ---
I absolutely concur with everything you've written - as far as you go. There are two sides of this problem and (as I see it) our approach is lopsided.

SM (or anything else susceptible to ELINT collection) is absolutely the best (risk vs. ROI analysis) TARGETING tool we have, especially today when it has become so ubiquitous that people take it for granted without adequate consideration for OPSEC. After all how many people using cell phones actually think of them as radios - and all that implies WRT interception, analysis, and exploitation? We have achieved phenomenal successes because of our ability to capitalize on the adversaries' myopia (and in fairness to the more sophisticated - their technical limitations) WRT exploitable communications vulnerabilities.

My concern with our current approach to SM is not the exploitation part, it's the "shaping" part. Personally I would much rather influence millions with an IO campaign vice 100's with bombs & bullets (actions the adversary can then use as part of their IO counter-campaign - to influence the millions we missed with the DA message). That's where I see our weakness WRT ICT. You'd think a country that does so well selling consumerism would be at least as competitive in the "marketplace of ideas". (To illustrate my point - check out the GAO [or] DOD IG report about the contractor provided "propaganda campaign" in Afghanistan.)

Course that's MOO, YMMV. Quality discussion with a lot of food for thought in any event.
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A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero (42B.C)
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