{"id":5312,"date":"2023-08-02T02:54:35","date_gmt":"2023-08-02T02:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=5312"},"modified":"2023-08-02T02:54:36","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T02:54:36","slug":"a-guide-to-understanding-the-hoax-of-the-century-tablet-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/02\/a-guide-to-understanding-the-hoax-of-the-century-tablet-magazine\/","title":{"rendered":"A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century – Tablet Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This is very much a dispatch from the far reaches of the paranoid style in American politics. But even if you wouldn’t put the pieces together the same way that the author does (and I wouldn’t), the pieces themselves are fascinating and troubling. And I’m in full agreement that our recent approach to disinformation and the double-thinkish ‘malinformation’ is an alarming trend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens\u2019 phones and laptops. The Kremlin\u2019s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call \u201ccognitive hacking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[…]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department\u2019s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting U.S. citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated. \u201cThe 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren\u2019t collecting data on U.S. citizens. Well, \u2026 by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it\u2019s a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a U.S. citizen in Tunisia, I don\u2019t have the ability to discern that \u2026 If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access \u2026 I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war\u2014an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace\u2014the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a \u201cwhole of society\u201d effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/news\/articles\/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is very much a dispatch from the far reaches of the paranoid style in American politics. But even if you wouldn’t put the pieces together the same way that the author does (and I wouldn’t), the pieces themselves are fascinating and troubling. And I’m in full agreement that our recent approach to disinformation and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1nG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5313,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5312\/revisions\/5313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}