PsyOPS

General Bouchard acknowledges that NATO's informants in Libya were journalists [Voltaire Network] In a 31 October 2011 interview on Radio Canada, Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, who led Operation Unified Protector in Libya, revealed that an analysis unit was set up at NATO headquarters in Naples.

It’s mission was to study and decipher what was happening on the ground, that is to say both the movements of the Libyan Army and those of the "rebels. " To fortify the unit, several information networks were created. "The intelligence came from many sources, including the media who were on the ground and provided us with a lot of information regarding the intentions and the location of the ground forces. " This is the first time a NATO official admits that foreign journalists in Libya were assets of the Atlantic Alliance. Shortly before the fall of Tripoli, Thierry Meyssan caused a stir by affirming that most Western journalists staying at the Hotel Rixos were NATO agents. Darpa Wants to Master the Science of Propaganda. Mark Twain once tried to distinguish between the storyteller’s art and tales that a machine could generate.

He observed that stringing “incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities,” was the province of the American storyteller. A machine might imitate simple formulas behind yarns, but never quite master them. The Pentagon’s freewheeling research arm is hoping to prove Twain wrong.

Darpa is asking scientists to “take narratives and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion.” The idea is to detect terrorists who have been indoctrinated by propaganda. The program is called “Narrative Networks.” “Stories are important in security contexts,” Darpa said in an Oct. 7 solicitation for research proposals. In the first 18-month phase of the program, the Pentagon wants researchers to study how stories infiltrate social networks and alter our brain circuits. Does Africa need an Arab Spring? 24 January 2012Last updated at 08:13 Uganda's government has survived protests over the cost of living As the people of Egypt and Tunisia mark the first anniversary of the revolutions which toppled their long-time leaders, leading to popular uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world, Malawian academic Jimmy Kainja asks: Is it time for an African Spring?

Regimes have been shaken, dictators toppled and revolutions televised in ways most people thought was not possible a mere 12 months ago in North Africa and the Middle East. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to some of the world's longest-serving and most autocratic leaders - and that is exactly what residents of some Arab countries have been fighting against. Yet an African Spring in the exact fashion of the Arab Spring would signify a step backwards - not a step forward.

I previously argued that "the protagonists of the Arab Spring have more to learn from their sub-Saharan Africa counterparts than the other way round. 'Selfish, greedy leaders' Darpa’s Plan to Trap the Next WikiLeaker: Decoy Documents. WikiLeakers may have to think twice before clicking on that “classified” document.

It could be the digital smoking gun that points back at them. Darpa-funded researchers are building a program for “generating and distributing believable misinformation.” The ultimate goal is to plant auto-generated, bogus documents in classified networks and program them to track down intruders’ movements, a military research abstract reveals. “We want to flood adversaries with information that’s bogus, but looks real,” says Salvatore Stolfo, the Columbia University computer science professor leading the project. “This will confound and misdirect them.” The program aims to scare off uninvited riff-raff as well as minimize insider threats, one of the greatest vulnerabilities in military networks. With that trail of digital breadcrumbs, agencies can track down prying eyes more easily. Jaguar Columbia University has a pending patent application on the decoy-creating technology.