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• Saturday, May 10, 2008 08:50 AM

  clear and unequivocal attribution enforced by mandate

  Once you're finger gets tired of pointing at some indistinct objection off in the horizon of outraged indignation...what EXACTLY do you want done about it? Or is that beside the point? Heh.

  -- shooter242

  Because prohibitons never stopped anyone in or out of government and with the internets and fully wired world, it's a moot point.

  Smith-Mundt is a Moot Case - Except It's Not

  By Patricia H. Kushlis

  Why is it that the U.S. government still operates its overseas information activities as if the Internet had never been invented? Or actually, it operates them with increasing impunity as if Smith-Mundt, the law that came into being in 1948 and was strengthened during the Vietnam War that separates information aimed at foreigners from information designed for American consumption, had been repealed years ago. Except it wasn’t. This artificial and meaningless firewall – supposedly to keep the executive branch of the U.S. government from “propagandizing” the American people – should have been repealed once the Internet took hold.

  By 1996 when I worked in the US Information Agency’s Information Bureau and we published quarterly electronic journals on national security issues, developed our own subject-specific web pages as well as a regular news service called the Washington File, it was clear the Smith-Mundt designated separation between information and information had become meaningless.

  [...]

  What can and should, however, be instituted – with no exceptions for any branch or agency of the US government including the CIA and the US military is a policy of clear information attribution. This also includes any information products produced by contractors for the US government. Remember the Lincoln Group? Or how about General Dynamics which has added the manufacture of web pages for overseas audiences to its weapons production arsenal - in a bizarre sort of contractor mission creep?

  What goes around comes around

  The problem with Smith-Mundt is particularly true in the viral Internet era. What’s the old adage: “What goes around comes around?” Have you ever wondered how many of those “good news” stories in the Iraqi media were bought, paid for and placed by some US government contractor? Think how difficult it must be for reporters covering Iraq to distinguish the fake from the real. Some of this is called PSYOPS, or psychological operations – but I wonder sometimes who the ultimate recipient really is.

  Then there’s disinformation – concocted stories designed to mislead an enemy during wartime – another form of PYSOPS. The Soviets were really good at disinformation. I saw one of their more infamous products circulating in the Finnish media when I was Information Officer in Helsinki at the end of the Cold War. It was the “baby parts” story, circulated without attribution and designed to make America look really bad.

  It seems to me, therefore, that the best way we can protect ourselves from ourselves – or the blow-back from overheated US government paid-for information operations particularly on the military side of the house which has been on a war footing since 2003 - is jettisoning an archaic law now all but ignored with a “wink and a nod” and replacing it with a policy of clear attribution that is strictly enforced not evaded...

  http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2008/05/smith-mundt-is.html#more

  Even this won't stop everyone, but it is a step in the right direction.

  —L.W.M. Read L.W.M.'s other letters
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