Use Stealth Bloggers Suggests Study Written For U.S. Special Operations Command

Posted on April 9, 2008

Wired's Danger Room has an interesting post that says a study written for U.S. Special Operations Command suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers." Here's an excerpt from the report.

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence... to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.
An alternative strategy is to "make" a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly.

Blogging could be used by the military as an effective information or disinformation strategy. The process of "making" a blogger would be a very time intensive one. It can take a while to be vetted in the blogosphere and other bloggers might be suspicious of a new blogger that appeared to be being propelled by an unknown outside force. If Special Ops wanted to have "stealth bloggers" for use on some mission they would need to have them already in play long before they needed them.