Obviously, CIA want ISIS to carry on tweeting because ISIS is a CIA tool, as we have explained before. ISIS is run on behalf of CIA by Prince Bandar (bin Sultan bin Abd’ul-Aziz) and Prince Khaled (bin Bandar bin Abd’ul-Aziz) of Saudi Arabia, see Wayne Madsen, here – RB
Usaian Intelligence Officials Want ISIL Fighters to Keep Tweeting
Colin Daileda, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Mashable, Jul 11 2014
Jihadis in Iraq are using social media to spread fear and propaganda in a way no group has done before. Fighters from ISIL have shared Instagram pictures of gory executions, and have posted YouTube videos showing a beheading while tweeting:
This is our ball. It’s made of skin #WorldCup.
Seemingly without break, their Twitter accounts spew a mixture of carnage and preaching, peppered with weird jokes and gruesome taunts. And Usaian officials want them to keep it up. An employee with a major social media company told Mashable that Usaian intelligence officials approached the company and asked that the ISIL accounts not be taken down. The employee said on condition that he and his company not be named:
Usaian intelligence prefers for these accounts to stay up, rather than come down.
The reason? Usaian intelligence officials are monitoring the ISIL accounts, trying to glean information about the group and its strengths, tactics and networks. Social media “is one of the many sources” Usaian analysts monitor when “assessing the fluid ISIL situation,” a Usaian intelligence official told Mashable on condition of anonymity. Jason Healey, a founding member of the Pentagon’s first joint cyberwar unit and now director of the Atlantic Council’s Statecraft Initiative (the kind of guy you can really trust to give you the truth about Usaian covert action – RB), said:
Whether or not it makes more sense to be trying to quash this kind of communication so they can’t get their message out, intel folks would always want them to have it more open.
ISIL is the first international terror group to have embraced social media as a vital part of its identity. When they are not fighting, the militants tweet to no end, sharing pictures of captured weapons, taking over popular memes and tweeting about about their battle plans. In fact, their social media presence is so energetic, experts believe they are either quite naive about their exposure or their messages are part of a plan to inflate the group’s power and popularize themselves amongst potential recruits. Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told Mashable (here playing the racist ‘natives are like children’ card – RB):
These guys are so busy promoting themselves online, you’d think they were Justin Bieber.
Certainly, the group appears to have a coordinated social media strategy, according to experts on intelligence gathering and the Middle East. As Calev Litaru, a fellow at Georgetown University, put it: ISIL is the first group to use “social media as an actual weapon of war.” Even so, social media is a double-edged sword since it allows Usaian analysts to discover things about the fighters they might not want to reveal. Watts said (gee whiz, this guy is so sharp, who needs tradecraft? – RB):
Right now I could get online and I could watch ISIL on social media and tell you where they are operating, which countries they’re from and who they’re working with.
By studying social media feeds, Usaian intelligence analysts can better understand what motivates ISIL fighters, the hierarchy of the organization and the ultimate aims of the group. As Watts told Mashable, ISIL fighters tweet about their plans and their leaders, and different factions of the group have ideological debates on Facebook. If analysts know where to look, all they have to do is watch. Intelligence expert Pieter Van Ostaeyen, who has been following ISIL tweets, says they reveal a stunning amount (the mental age of the assumed readership for this article is about 14, I reckon – RB):
There’s a lot of information that is being spread by ISIL accounts which could be used if Usaia opts for drone attacks on Syria or Iraq. They don’t seem to be afraid of anything being put out in the open. Or maybe they just don’t realize what they’re doing.
He cited an example from a few weeks ago, involving five British-born ISIL fighters, who went on Twitter to chat about meeting at a specific Syrian Internet cafe. When some of the other militants didn’t show up as agreed, one of the fighters complained to the others on Twitter as if they were “in some private chatroom,” Van Ostaeyen said. Beyond such analysis of “open source” intelligence, Usaian officials are likely to have approached companies such as Facebook and Twitter to try to gain access to individual accounts, terrorism experts say. With that kind of access, agents could get information including the individual computer’s IP address, using that to pinpoint the exact location of a fighter. Access to someone’s Twitter account might also reveal an email address, which could lead to a new contact list for analysts to monitor. Twitter and Facebook declined to comment for this article. YouTube, for its part, said that the company complies with “valid court orders and subpoenas,” but declined to answer specific questions about ISIL. Tom Sanderson of CSIS (here’s another guy who’s never averse to talkin’ shit for hard money – RB), said:
Even if we were able to use the IP addresses, we’d have to be willing and able to deploy cyber tools, special ops and drones. And all three of those are currently imperfect responses to ISIL. Though Usaia could pass information to the Iraqi government or even militias preparing to fight ISIL, I don’t think the Usaian government is about to do that. Information leaks to ISIL or an unfriendly government are too great a risk.
Spreading fear and propaganda, of course, is nothing new. The terror of Genghis Khan’s campaign across Mongolia in the 12th century was a language of sorts. Heads on spikes communicated a clear message of pitilessness that helped crush opponents’ spirits. Much later, AQ would found Inspire magazine (another piece of grotesquely obvious CIA hype, but hey, we got a Usaian audience here, with a mental age of 14, we already factored that in – RB) to spread propaganda and its offshoot in Iraq would turn to televised beheadings to signal their willingness to commit unspeakably brutal acts (not too unspeakable for you to yak about – RB). During the late 2000s, as AQI was losing ground, decimated by both Usaian forces and local Sunni tribes turning against them, the group clung to life in part through social media, according to Watts. And just as the Internet was evolving from a series of static websites to a digital sphere fueled by connectivity, AQ was evolving as a network. The group took lessons learned about fighting, recruitment and propaganda in Iraq with them into Syria, where they emerged some years later as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Plus, also, they learned to ‘franchise’ themselves, just like Ronald McDonald, right? – RB). An influx of often young and tech savvy volunteers from the west (not CIA-trained false flag artists, noooo – RB) has helped the group translate its message, not just linguistically but technologically and culturally through the appropriation of memes (yeah, you heard it here: memes – RB), for example to a western audience. Yet there is something paradoxical about a group that wants to return everyone to the Dark Ages, yet uses high-tech Usaian companies to disseminate that message (only if you believe all this shit in the first place – RB). In terms of how to respond, some terrorism experts think it might be worthwhile trying to shut down some of the more prolific accounts. But few really think it’s a feasible task. Sanderson told Mashable:
These guys can move to so many new accounts on Twitter and Facebook, it’s just going to be an endless game of whack-a-mole (Who first came up with that brilliant meme for 14-year old covert ops mavens? Yeah, it was Dick Cheney – RB)
J M Berger, a researcher who focuses on extremists’ use of social media (Ain’t it hard to stumble, and land in some highly-paid psyops merchant’s lagoon? – RB), told Mashable:
Extremists are on social media to stay, and there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle (That’s right, it was all prophesied ‘with uncanny accuracy’ in the Disney version of Aladdin – RB).
Pentagon and CIA Want to Keep ISIS Tweeting
Kurt Nimmo, Infowars, Jul 14 2014
Earlier this month we learned DARPA, the Pentagon’s research lab, has funded an array of social media studies, including analyses on various social and political memes, celebrities and disinformation. RT.com reported:
The project list includes a study of how activists with the Occupy movement used Twitter as well as a range of research on tracking internet memes and some about understanding how influence behavior (liking, following, retweeting) happens on a range of popular social media platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, Kickstarter, Digg and Reddit.
The Pentagon studies paralleled an experiment by Facebook controlling emotions by manipulating news feeds. Facebook has connections to the CIA and the Pentagon. Ben Quinn and James Ball wrote in the Graun:
Shortly before the Facebook controversy erupted, DARPA published a lengthy list of the projects funded under its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program, including links to actual papers and abstracts.
ISIS has used social media as an effective propaganda tool. The NYT reported in June:
The extremist group battling the Iraqi government may practice a seventh-century version of fundamentalist Islam, but it has demonstrated modern sophistication when it comes to using social media, particularly Twitter and other sites like WordPress and Tumblr.
Usaia is not trying to diminish the social media reach of IS despite the fact this would logically be near the top of its to-do list in combating the rapidly expanding terrorist caliphate. An employee with a major social media company told Mashable that Usaian intelligence officials approached the company and asked that the ISIL accounts not be taken down. The employee said on condition that he and his company not be named:
Usaian intelligence prefers for these accounts to stay up, rather than come down.
The reason? Usaian intelligence officials are monitoring the ISIL accounts, trying to glean information about the group and its strengths, tactics and networks. Social media “is one of the many sources” Usaian analysts monitor when “assessing the fluid ISIL situation,” a Usaian intelligence official told Mashable on condition of anonymity. However, instead of gleaning questionable intelligence, the Pentagon and the CIA are interested in controlling emotions and drumming up consensus for the coming war against the Islamic State. As the Nick Berg beheading video and other brutal AQ propaganda videos demonstrated in the past, the value of terrorist social media is in its ability to produce irrational emotions that can then be exploited by the state as it carries out its permanent war agenda. The Islamic State, funded by the Wahhabi Gulf emirates, supported by the CIA, and trained by the Usaian military, specializes in this sort of gruesome material. Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels, explains Richard Alan Nelson. The GWOT, designed to last indefinitely, requires “purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions.” IS takes the brutal AQ meme to the next level and pumps up the volume.
Niqnaq 