[Infowarrior] - Happy 100th birthday, information warfare

[Richard Forno]

(c/o JH)

IMHO say "IW" and its various applications have been around FAR longer than just WW1.  But it's weekend, I'm not going to quibble (much).  --rick


Happy 100th birthday, information warfare

How World War I led to modern propaganda and surveillance

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/happy-100th-birthday-information-warfare/2014/08/01/3786e262-1732-11e4-85b6-c1451e622637_story.html


By John Maxwell Hamilton August 1 at 4:28 PM

One hundred years ago this Monday, after German troops marched into
Belgium, Britain declared war and scarcely an hour later it sent its
cable ship Alert into the English Channel. By dawn, amid heavy rain
and wind, the crew had severed Germany’s five most important Atlantic
cables. For the duration of the war, Berlin’s ability to communicate
abroad, even with many of its embassies, was impaired.

Today we take for granted that information warfare — whether the
disruption of other nations’ computer systems, the monitoring of
citizens’ telephone calls to detect terrorist threats or the use of
social media to shape foreign attitudes — is a key tool of national
security. These measures, and the debates about their proper limits in
a democracy, seem unprecedented because they are driven by new
technologies. But virtually all our concerns about such tactics find
their roots in the Great War, particularly in its first hours, when
the Alert’s hatchet-wielding crew began its work.

The notion of winning the “hearts and minds” of local populations, so
common to discussions of war today, played out not only abroad but at
home a century ago. The unprecedented scale of World War I required
mass domestic mobilization. Governments had to persuade their citizens
to serve in the military or, if they stayed at home, to conserve
precious resources, pay higher taxes, buy war bonds and patriotically
stick with the war as it dragged bloodily along.


While the British sprinted ahead in disrupting communications, all
belligerents quickly sought the high ground in the battle of
propaganda. The same day the Germans invaded Belgium, they issued a
“White Book” justifying their actions to the world. Similar reports,
known by the rainbow of colors on their covers, followed: a British
“Blue Book” on Aug. 6, a Russian “Orange Book” on Aug. 16 and so forth
until the French, who were especially egregious in omitting and
falsifying facts, issued a “Yellow Book” on Dec. 1.

The warring nations understood that propaganda is a function of both
what is said and what is not said. The first German government press
directive included in its list of prohibited subjects any mention of
censorship itself. The French banned references to a former finance
minister who favored diplomatic solutions to disagreements with
Germany. Despite its long democratic tradition, the British government
kept secret the existence of the propaganda agency it created at
Wellington House.

The United States was a key propaganda target. The Germans wanted it
to stay out of the war and hoped the American government would press
the British to relax their naval blockade. The British wanted all the
material support possible and a free hand to tighten the noose around
Germany. The blockade, plus control of transatlantic cables, allowed
the British to intercept American communications, including consular
mail, which they did shamelessly. This was a major source of
irritation to Washington, much as the Germans took umbrage at U.S.
tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone .

The Germans aggressively courted German Americans and the legislators
who represented them. To reach mass audiences, they bought U.S.
newspapers, at one point even considering the purchase of The
Washington Post. But the Germans were clumsy. Their chief propagandist
in the United States was so intemperate in his remarks, most notably
with an over-the-top defense of Germany’s sinking of the passenger
ship Lusitania, that he had to return home. Two German military
attaches, who had the odd dual responsibilities of propaganda and the
sabotage of American plants supplying the Allies, were expelled when
documents revealed their plans to foment labor strikes and contained
unflattering comments about President Woodrow Wilson.

In contrast was Britain’s Sir Gilbert Parker, whose work seems like a
precursor to social media. Married to an American and well known to
U.S. readers, the novelist headed a secret program in which he and
other leading British figures urged the Allied viewpoint in seemingly
innocent letters to American influentials. In one of his reports,
which survive in the British archives, Parker noted, “In the eyes of
the American people the quiet and subterranean nature of our work has
the appearance of a purely private patriotism and enterprise.”


Americans came late to the war. But within a week of entering in April
1917, President Wilson launched the nation’s first effort to
systematically shape public attitudes, the Committee on Public
Information. The CPI was headquartered in a brick rowhouse still
standing on Lafayette Square. Its director, the aggressive journalist
George Creel, frequently walked the short distance to the White House.
He was considered one of the half-dozen most influential political
figures in Washington during the war.

The CPI’s influence at home was manifested in articles, cartoons and
advertisements in newspapers and magazines; in public school lessons,
university textbooks and Sunday sermons; in talks at movie theaters,
Indian reservations and anywhere else the CPI’s 75,000 Four Minute Men
(volunteers charged with delivering short speeches on the war effort)
found an audience; in feature films and in ads on theater curtains; in
posters plastered on buildings and on storefronts; in pamphlets
distributed by the millions.

Abroad, Creel’s staff set up reading rooms, tested techniques for
dropping leaflets in enemy territory by air, established a cable news
service and distributed movies with propaganda value. To a degree
never seen before for a president’s pronouncements, the CPI promoted
Wilson’s idealistic rhetoric overseas.


The men and women of the CPI were muckrakers, suffragists, municipal
reformers and leading progressive educators. Their legacy includes the
public affairs officers in our embassies, who explain American values
abroad, and the Federal Register, which evolved from a CPI publication
created to bring the daily actions of government to light. Yet in
making the world “safe for democracy,” the CPI could not resist using
its considerable powers to set anti-democratic precedents.

Creel headed off official news censorship domestically, but the CPI
suppressed and sanitized news — and views. “News itself must be given
a new definition,” he said. The committee extolled transparency but
supplied the news media with stories that were not identified as
CPI-written, and created front organizations to work with immigrant
groups and labor. The CPI foreswore emotional propaganda, but with
other domestic propaganda groups pushing it along, the committee
contributed to hate propaganda against Germany and German Americans.
One war poster, referring to Germany, declared: “Such a civilization
is not fit to live.”

Overseas the CPI subsidized publications and bribed editors.
Zealousness and naivete led it to publicize bogus documents aimed at
undermining the Bolshevik revolution, an act that contributed to
deteriorating ties with the new Russian government. In its efforts to
stifle dissent, the CPI became an accomplice to the trampling of civil
liberties under such laws as the 1917 Espionage Act.

That act is a legal basis for the current administration’s prosecution
of journalists and leakers . And that is just one ominous echo. When
National Security Agency officials resist explaining the extent to
which they burrow into our lives, we can hear Creel arguing for
squelching public discussion of postal censorship. When the Obama
administration discourages journalists’ access to government
officials, we hear Wilson’s secretary of state insisting that none of
his subordinates speak to the press. For his part, Wilson advocated
“pitiless publicity” of government actions but suspended presidential
news conferences for the duration of the war on the grounds that he
was too busy.

Before the Great War, the authoritative Encyclopedia Britannica had no
entry for “propaganda.” The subject was not deemed significant. In the
edition published shortly after the war, an entry on propaganda ran
nearly 10 pages of small, dense type. Its pithy definition hinted at
the odious connotation the word had acquired: “Those engaged in a
propaganda may genuinely believe that success will be an advantage to
those whom they address, but the stimulus to their action is their own
cause.”


The CPI was a catalyst for government opinion-molding, which has
become so pervasive it is impossible to identify all the people who
engage in it during all or part of their workday. It also is a lesson
in a fundamental threat to democracy — the too-easy morphing of
wholesome government information that the public needs to reach sound
opinions into the distortion and suppression of information
inconvenient to a leader’s objectives.

The most profound legacy of the information war of a century ago is
the doubt it planted about the integrity of government. “This whole
discussion about the ways and means of controlling public opinion
testifies to the collapse of the traditional species of democratic
romanticism,” a leading scholar in the new field of propaganda, Harold
Lasswell, wrote in 1927. “. . . That credulous utopianism, which fed
upon the mighty words which exploited the hopes of the mass in war,
has in many minds given way to cynicism and disenchantment.”

jhamilt at lsu.edu

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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.