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News :: Miscellaneous |
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IMC Servers Down |
Current rating: 0 |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
25 Nov 2001
Modified: 26 Nov 2001 |
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The main IMC servers that govern the domain indymedia.org were down for approximately 3 and a half hours Sunday evening. |
The main IMC servers that govern the domain indymedia.org were down from at least 9pm CST Sunday until 12:30am Monday morning. This could be due to either a technical fault or a denial of service attack.
I don't like to be part of the overly paranoid crowd, but it is interesting that this seems to have occured just as the first major infusion of US ground troops is underway in Afghanistan. Elements of Marine forces operating off of carriers in the Indian Ocean, logistically supported by US forces in Pakistan, landed at an airfield near the southern Afghan stronghold of the Taliban, Kandahar, on Sunday.
I just happened to come across this report tonight at Cryptome that reflects recent US military psyops planning. It makes very interesting reading, even if the IMC network outage is simply the result of a clumsy IMC volunteer tripping over a powercord in Seattle. Follow the link below to read the report. Here is a couple of brief excerpts from "The Creation and Dissemination of All Forms of Information in Support of Psychological Operations (PSYOP) in Time of Military Conflict"
In the Information Age there is an increasing reliance on sophisticated, near-real time media dissemination. Information, and its denial, is power. The state or entity most able to effectively control or manage information, especially managing the perceptions of particular target audiences, will be the most influential.
SNIP>>>>>
Web Sites.
]eb sites are so widely known that this report shall skip all discussion of them except to briefly remark that they are quite suitable for dissemination of PSYOP content.
Email.
Email is probably the predominant means of communication for Internet consumers and could also be an excellent medium for PSYOP. It would be rather easy to find a large number of email addresses for users in a country, and then begin to send them email. This can be blocked, but such blocking is generally done by the receiving organization rather than by the service provider. Hence, one might expect a rather porous barrier to unsolicited email into a country. This email could of course contain images and sounds in addition to text. If desired, each message could be tailored to an individual recipient, thus providing some rough form of geographic tailoring and helping to keep opposing authorities somewhat in the dark about what everyone is receiving.
Chat Rooms and Messaging.
Internet chat rooms may also have potential PSYOP uses, in that "guided discussions" could perhaps be used to influence how citizens think about certain topics. This example is already in practical use with the candidates in the U.S. presidential elections. China has begun to set up monitored chat rooms so its citizens can discuss a wide range of matters. In the Chinese approach, offending messages are deleted before, or just after, they have been sent to everyone. Such chat rooms might be a way to allow citizens of a country to air their grievances. While the originating point of a chat message is not hard to discover, there are ways around such monitoring. In China, for instance. a great many chat messages come from Internet cafes, and so cannot be traced back to specific people. |
See also:
http://cryptome.org/dsb-psyop.htm
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Continuing Problems |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
26 Nov 2001
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It looks like the attack (or whatever the problem is) on the main Indymedia servers continues, instead of being resolved. Both U-C IMC and all other URLs in the domain indymedia.org are inaccessible. U-C IMC may be accessed by going to:
http://www.ucimc.org |
