Yesterday, I spoke to the Phoenix Challenge, the information operations symposium put on by the Defense Department. Most of the conference was highly classified. I had to surrender my BlackBerry before I was escorted in. And when my session was through, I was promptly escorted out.
But just because the event was secret squirrel doesn't mean you guys should miss the chance to check out my talk. So here are my notes.
On a second pass, I'd probably be more nuanced, covering what the Pentagon might learn from "the two most significant information operations of recent memory. I'm speaking, of course, about
Israel's war against Hamas – and Barack Obama's war against Hillary
Clinton and John McCain."
But this was my first take. Have a read, after the jump.
- I'm not going to presume to tell you how to do your jobs. Instead,
I figured I'd share some general principles about how information tends to spread online. Then I'll look at the two most significant information campaigns of recent memory. I'm speaking, of course, about
Israel's war against Hamas – and Barack Obama's war against Hillary
Clinton and John McCain.
- I'll skip the part where I tell you that just about the whole world is connected these days. Bottom line: When everybody's connected, word spreads fast.
- How long did it take for that rumor to spread that al Qaeda has caught the bubonic plague? Or the zinger about the terror group using gay rape as an initiation rite? (By the way: Whoever in this room came up with that one – kudos to you, sir.)
- Rule # 2: With that many people connected, keeping control of information is just about impossible. Especially when you combine new media's connectivity with old media's resources to investigate. How long did it take for one sentence from Senator Feinstein's testimony about U.S. drones on Pakistani soil to become worldwide news? 24 hours?
How long did it take to find Google Earth images, confirming that sentence? Another 48?
- With that many people talking at once, it's really hard to get a handle on which are important, which aren't. In military circles especially, I've noticed a tendency to want to "check the box" of cyberspace. Yes, I've left a message in the comment thread of a blog.
Therefore, I've "engaged the blogosphere! Check! Next assignment!"
Well, no.
- Online, people tend to form cocoons of conversation.
Conservatives talk to conservatives, liberals to liberals. Science fiction fans gather in one corner. Basketball fans, another. That can trick you into thinking you're spreading your message, when you're really just talking to yourself. Take the bloggers' roundtables, run by the Defense Department's public affairs shop. Great resource. But they tend to talk mostly to bloggers who already support them. Which means the influence is minimal.
- To cut through the noise – and to penetrate all those little echo chambers -- you need a message that's sharp, and simple. Bland statements-by-committee just don't work. In fact, the more you vet and control your statements, the less effective it is. Which is why the military has so often done a lousy job. Every statement has to be approved, ten rungs up the chain. Many of the smartest things are said in secret. What's said in public is often wrapped in a an impenetrable field of jargon and acronym.
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- Now, if you want to look at an information campaign run right, look no further than our new president. Listen to the chatters on cable
TV every night during the campaign, and you'd think he was getting his butt handed to him. And it's true, he suffered all kinds of tactical losses.
- But in cyberspace, something very different was happening. He was building a strategic victory. His campaign enforced a clear, simple brand – and then let others take it from there.
- Online, a zillion web sites, blogs, Youtube videos, Facebook and
MySpace groups, and Twitter feeds popped up. Some were done with campaign approval. Many were not. But even the ones built with campaign money weren't tightly controlled. In fact, some even openly contradicted the campaign. When Obama came out in favor of immunity for the telecom companies who had helped the government in its domestic surveillance efforts, groups of Obama supporters, on his own website, organized to oppose him. The campaign just let it happen.
- Next, the campaign recognized that there's a huge desire out there right now to contribute to causes they believe in. Whether it's correcting answers on Wikipedia or becoming a cyber-soldier in the online war between Russia and Georgia, people now have a sense that they possess a small part of a much greater puzzle. And they want to connect their piece.
- The Obama campaign made it *ridiculously* easy to do so – whether it was donate money, recruiting volunteers, or spreading the word. Back when I worked for the Clinton campaign, if I wanted to get people to call their neighbors to remind them to vote, I'd corral everyone into a union basement, give them scripts, and closely monitor what they said.
During last year's campaign, all it took was a few clicks for an Obama volunteer to start make those same calls, on her own. Except this time, she'd do it on her own phone, in her own home. With nobody watching over her shoulder.
Don't get me wrong: The campaign's inner circle showed a Mafia-like omerta, when it came to preventing leaks. It was the most leak-free political team in recent memory. But the wider campaign was a different story. The Obama crowd showed that you don't need to control those supporters much at all. You just need a strong brand, and a strong architecture – and let your supporters do the rest.
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Over the New Year's holiday, however, it looked like a second – and very different – model for information warfare was emerging. It came from Israel, and its battle against Hamas. And rather than ease back on the control, Israel tried to exert it more tightly than any military in a long time.
The battle started with a classic piece of military deception –
Defense Minister Ehud Barak feigning a peace initiative, and then launching a massive set of airstrikes. From there, the strategy seemed simple: Lock the traditional media out of Gaza, and spread its own messages, through YouTube, Twitter, and the like.
- But when I went to Israel in January, it became pretty clear that this wasn't the strategy at all. In fact, there was no coherent information strategy – other than, to hell with what the rest of the world thinks.
- Israeli generals told me that one of the big mistakes they made in their 2006 war with Hezbollah was worrying too much about global opinion. It inhibited their operations, and got people on both side killed. This time, they'd do the exact opposite.
And not care a bit about what anyone else thought.
- The online piece was no strategy either. I met the kid who ran
Israel's YouTube site. He's a young guy named Lee -- born in a small town in Hawaii, converted to Judaism at Yale, and moved to Israel last year. He thought it'd be kinda cool to share some videos online. So up went the site.
- The architecture wasn't the only thing that was slap-dash. The branding was awfully confused, too. You have foreign ministry telling the Arab world that Israel is a crazed animal that needs to be kept in check
– or else. Then you've also got officials trying to convince the world that every one of its strikes was taken with the utmost care. That they're dropping flowers, instead of bombs.
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In text messages and hacked TV broadcasts, the Israelis told the people of Gaza that Hamas' leaders were a bunch of cowards. But then would tell outside reporters that Hamas was much smarter, tougher, etc than
Fatah. It all was a mishmosh. It made no sense.
- This wasn't an information strategy. It was, at best, a series of tactics. An information holding campaign, designed to keep the world at bay for a couple of weeks. And when those couple of weeks ended – and reports of mass casualties started seeping out, and western reporters managed to find their way in – the whole thing collapsed. World opinion swung wildly against Israel. In Gaza and in the West Bank, many opinion polls say Hamas is now more popular than its rivals in Fatah. Which makes you wonder exactly how much was accomplished by this war.
- But I did find one spokesman for the Israeli cause who was remarkably articulate, and moving. He was a UAV remote pilot named Gil.
He was a young father of three, and he spoke with incredible passion about the absolutely brutal moral choices he had to make in this war.
How he'd see a rocket being launched from a Gaza school, and have to choose between hurting Palestinian kids if he attacked – and risking
Israeli children if he didn't. He talked about all the times he held back from giving the order to attack – even when his own troops were under fire. The care and the compassion he displayed put him in marked contrast with the indiscriminate killing carried out by Hamas, firing rockets by thousands into Israeli schoolyards.
- I thought: How much better off would Israel have done in the information war, if they had equipped this guy to fight it?
- And then I thought: Would the United States have done things any differently?
[Special thanks to Aram Sinnreich and Clay Shirky; photo: U.S. Embassy, Oslo]
