Thus facts, lies, and mixtures of facts and lies can all be considered subversive propaganda. It would be easy under a system of rules designed to prohibit outside subversion, to classify such a statement as subversive propaganda. The statement that we are putting a woman to death are completely true, even though the Iranian government is making the statement in order to cast America in a poor light. The government attempting to resist outside propaganda will declare that all incoming propaganda are sheer lies, but the danger there is that the public will realize that at least some of the propaganda is true, which will make them suspicious about government statements about the false information.īut consider recent comments from Iran about America's use of the death penalty. When one country is trying to destabilize or take down another country's government, the most effective approach is to use a blend of truth, lies, and mixed statements.
There are three different ways you can use propaganda to destabilize an opponent: Second, if he posits that the internet should not be a permitted avenue for propaganda, how is this suddenly a threat to information technology? I'm all for the UN, but increasingly the backwards and the stupid are pushing an agenda that wants to wipe out the last thousand years of progress in human endeavors. I retain my right to give offense, and if you don't like it, too damned bad.Īny religion or government which can't stand some criticism should be banned. well, your government probably sucks no matter where you are. your country sucks if it takes away people's freedoms, your religion sucks if it confers an obligation on those of us who don't believe, your government sucks. People who embrace living in the stone age want to make it illegal for me to say that they're stupid for doing so. Sadly ever ass-hat oppressive regime who doesn't like to be criticized, and every stupid idiot who believes in the tooth fairy wants to remove my right to criticize them or point out that they're idiots. Yes, and the UN is also contemplating a ban on Defamation of Religion. So at what point does that become aggression? I ask in all honesty, I feel like this could have a major chilling effect on negotiations between nations where legitimate arguments could be construed as aggression. And then there is the slightly more blunt ".and the Russian people should rise up against it". Maybe that is taking it to the extreme, but what if it's "The Russian government is wrong and the Russian people shouldn't stand for it". So saying "The Russian government is wrong on this issue" could be considered an attack.
MWEATHER HORNELL FREE
'So any good cause, like promotion of democracy, cannot be used as a justification for such actions.' The Russians, and a lot of other countries such as Iran and China, apparently consider the free exchange of information to be an information technology threat. 'Practically any information operation conducted by a state or a number of states against another state would be qualified as an interference into internal affairs,' Korotkov said through an interpreter.
It's closer to the old Soviet term "ideological aggression." "At a UN disarmament conference in 2008, Sergei Korotkov of the Russian Defense Ministry argued that anytime a government promotes ideas on the Internet with the goal of subverting another country's government - even in the name of democratic reform - it should qualify as 'aggression.' And that, in turn, would make it illegal under the UN Charter.
What's interesting is that the term "information weapon," as defined by many of the countries trying to limit them, doesn't mean what you would think. DrgnDancer sends in an NPR piece on recent efforts to control so-called "information weapons" on the Internet.