When the nation becomes a victim. Conceptual foundations of information network wars
The beginning of the 21st century was characterized by the emergence of a new type of war in which victory is achieved not through the destruction of the armed forces and the economy of the enemy, but by influencing its moral and mental state.
If we follow the classification of wars in terms of changing social formations and technologies used, we have now entered the era of wars of the seventh generation - information network, which resulted from the following factors: the development of computer equipment and communications, which led to an increase in the role of information in life a society that, by the effectiveness of its influence, has surpassed many material types of resources; the successes of psychology in the study of people's behavior and the management of their motivations, which made it possible to exert a given effect on large groups of people; the development of non-lethal means of replacing traditional species weapons.
Hidden, but effective threat
The traditional war against a state that possesses nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous in our time. Modern political technologists, serving the interests of the ruling elites of Western countries, are seeking to transfer aggression from the material space to the information one. First of all, the traditional values of the people are reoriented or destroyed so that the information attack from the outside is perceived by the given society as corresponding to its striving for progress. External aggression in the mass consciousness takes the form of a civilizational transformation of a backward society to others at a higher stage of development.
Technologies of network wars were well developed during the Cold War as a form of total destruction of the geopolitical enemy. Informational network war consists in undermining and subsequent destruction of the basic characteristics of a nation, carried out mainly in a hidden form. Depending on the specific objectives of the impact on the enemy, one or another area of his public life may become a priority object of aggression.
The purpose of the information-network war is to assign most of the country's strategically important resources to the geopolitical aggressor. At the same time, the “transfer” of these resources to the aggressor is carried out by the elite of the victim country to a large extent voluntarily, since it is perceived not as a seizure, but as a path to development. This creates difficulty in recognizing the technology and methods of information-network war compared to the traditional one, as well as the lack of a timely response to the actions of the aggressor, since the victim does not have any measures to counter them. Moreover, if the results of the “hot” wars are challenged and revised over time (examples of this are the First and Second World Wars), then the results of the information-network war will not be revised until its aggressor authors lose their positions.
Signs of an attack
How these positions will be lost is currently unclear. The complexity of the issue lies in the fact that the front of the information-network war is located in the mental space of human society, in which the basic values of the nation-victim have already been replaced by psychological attitudes and myths of the aggressor. Mass consciousness is unable to recognize the fact of implantation of mental viruses in a timely manner. And the political and cultural elites, who became the object of the information-network war, lacking sufficient qualifications to identify informational aggression and organize an adequate response to the network enemy, are doomed to a crushing geopolitical defeat.
In fact, practically all public institutions, primarily the media and religious organizations, cultural institutions, non-governmental organizations, and public movements financed from abroad, are connected to the information-network war. Even scientists working under foreign grants contribute to the destruction of the state. All of them carry out the so-called distributed ataku, inflicting numerous point destructive attacks on the country's social system under the slogans of developing democracy and respect for human rights. Thanks to modern political technologies and accumulated experience of influencing the mass consciousness, the genocide of the population can be carried out without the use of gas chambers and mass executions. It is enough to create conditions for reducing fertility and increasing mortality.
Another feature of information network wars is the absence of a rigid hierarchy in the network structure of the aggressor. This is due to its heterogeneity, which is expressed in significant autonomy of state and non-state elements of this structure, where there are no pronounced vertical links. But there are numerous horizontal, the action of which is irregular. The lack of hierarchy and regularity of interaction does not allow to clearly identify the existence and activities of such a network structure.
driving forces
The source of energy for the considered network structures, it can be said “combustible”, is information that circulates in them, and peculiar “fuses” are the masters of the nodal points. An example of this is the social networking servers Facebook and Twitter, which are under the control of US intelligence agencies.
As the British The Guardian reported, advocacy work is already underway in the United States using Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The control center of this program is the United States Air Force McDill base in Florida, where 50 operators are involved, each of which controls about ten “agents of influence” registered in different countries of the world and leading the information war according to all the rules of political technologies of destruction of states. The cost of this program, according to the British newspaper, is estimated at 2,76 million dollars, providing for each of these fighters of the information war there is a convincing legend and protection measures against disclosure. According to the spokesman for the Central Command of the US Armed Forces, Bill Spix, any impact on the American audience is prohibited by the rules, which precludes the use of English. The information in the system is presented only in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, Farsi and some other languages depending on the target countries.
The identification and qualification of acts of information warfare are the task of the special services of each state that cares about its security. This is all the more important because, due to the unrevealed nature of information aggression, it is not perceived by society as a direct threat to the existence of the state. The expert community and intelligence agencies must show these threats, explaining them to the country's leadership to take appropriate measures.
Spheres and methods
The struggle is conducted in the following spaces: geographic - for establishing control over the territory through global (including space) information and intelligence systems; separatist movements and terrorist activity in various forms are encouraged in the enemy’s territory; the organization of popular unrest and "color revolutions"; economic - by imposing enslaving credits on the enemy, imposing an embargo, organizing economic sanctions and provocations; ideological - through slander, distortion of information, the substitution of concepts, the introduction of mental viruses and myths into the minds of the enemy’s population; network - due to hacker attacks and the introduction of computer viruses in computing and communication systems and databases.
Whatever the ultimate goal of an information-network war, the immediate task is always to make it difficult for people to access reliable information. The importance of this is explained by the fact that the efficiency and quality of decisions made at all levels directly depend on the completeness and reliability of the information provided.
The main methods of information confrontation.
1. Hiding critical information about the state of affairs in this area.
2. Immersion of valuable information into an array of so-called informational garbage in accordance with the principle of “hiding a leaf in the forest”.
3. Substitution of concepts or distortion of their meaning.
4. Distraction on insignificant events.
5. The use of concepts that are known to the public, but have not only definitions, but also significance.
6. Filing negative information that is better perceived by the audience than positive.
7. Reference to factors devoid of real meaning, as well as to incorrectly conducted sociological and marketing research.
8. The introduction of taboos on certain types of information, despite their well-known. This is done in order to avoid a broad discussion of issues and topics that are critical for certain structures.
9. Frank lie with the aim of preventing negative reaction of the population and foreign public.
10. In the arsenal of information wars there are such means as the "information bomb" and "information mine." The first serves as a detonator for the avalanche-like growth of the process in society, while the second is laid in advance and works during the process that has begun to bring it to its logical conclusion. The “information mines” were leaks from official government agencies or from sites like WikiLeaks.
A typical example of the use of technology information-network war are the uprisings of the masses in the countries of the Middle East. If in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, these technologies were not sufficiently manifested, then in Libya a “general run-through” of the wars of the seventh generation took place. The Libyan “revolution” appeared on the screens of the world media as a kind of simulator, a photo-replicated “copy without original”, the course of which was presented by global mass media without any correlation with reality, but in exact accordance with the script written by Western political technologists.
The Arab societies provoked to "revolutionary" speeches by information attacks from social networks Facebook and Twitter, caused a revolutionary wave in the Middle East. The explosion on Arab Street showed that social networks have become a “fuse” for the troubled atmosphere of the Middle East. In almost all countries involved in this whirlpool of events, a protest "flash mob" was organized by sending out messages about upcoming rallies and protests through social networks, email and mobile phones. It should be remembered that the managing servers of the global electronic networks Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail are located in the United States and are controlled by US intelligence agencies. This allows you to organize the sending of messages to a pre-selected "clientele" - to their agents of influence in the countries of the Arab East, who, from a signal from the outside, collect a critical mass of people at the right time in the right place using the so-called word of mouth.
The people of the Arab street, most of whom know nothing about the Internet, social networks, and often not having computers and cell phones, are ready to beat shop windows, burn cars and throw stones at the police, because they felt they had the opportunity to get even with the power of the poor. which they were doomed to the ruling regimes. The security services of the invaded states were powerless to resist violence in a new form of organization of the protest movement, which immediately acquired an avalanche-like, uncontrollable character. It turned out that it was impossible to foresee the beginning of street riots, as well as the sources for sending inflammatory messages, and disabling access to the Internet and mobile communications after the outbreak of riots did not solve anything, since the process had become a wildfire.
Social support
The modern world is explosively saturated with people with a highly inharmonized inner world. “Young lumps”, as sociologists call them, are a declassed mass with unrevealed social roots, without clear moral concepts and political guidelines. The activity of such elements in everyday life extends from the usual commercial fever to speculation in the stock and currency markets. With the growth of a revolutionary situation, their anti-systemic protest charge, which develops against the background of unrealized ambitions, increases.
So it was in the case of self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi - a Tunisian young man with a higher education who was forced to trade vegetables. Such people, being in constant search of their place in life, essentially become puppets, falling under the influence of social networks, crowd moods or ideologies of radical movements. And if they have no inner moral core, then it is impossible to imagine which motives will prevail in the next moment.
Mass media and information on social networks, covering such events, further intensify the atmosphere of mass psychosis. This is facilitated by shots taken by cell phone cameras with no one knows where, reports of the numerous victims who fell at the hands of government forces but were not shown “for humane reasons”, reports from cities allegedly captured by the rebels, indiscriminate firing of anti-aircraft machine guns to demonstrate the situation of the fighting action, wreckage of allegedly shot down government aircraft aviationthat bombed the rebels, the "transition" to the side of the people of Gaddafi's son, the flight of Libyan diplomats to the United States and France. However, if you look closely, you can see that a virtual war is being played out in the media, mounted and retouched on computers and thrown into virtual space as information chewing gum to justify UN Security Council sanctions.
If Tunisia and Egypt were the first samples of transatlantic directors of this pseudo-revolutionary performance, then Libya is the first real combat operation of the world information network war of the West against undesirable regimes. While in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington uses all the means and methods of global redistribution of the world, with the goal of changing leaders in countries that are of strategic interest to the United States, then in the states of the Middle East, the West initiates bringing to power the leaders of a new generation, replacing those Those who received education in the USSR are technocrats of the western formation and western mentality, who are called upon to strengthen the position of the United States while at the same time pushing China, the EU, and Russia. This is an example of an attempt to implement an information-network strategy of "controlled chaos", which turned out to be a new means of preserving global American leadership with minimal financial costs, except for the costs of advancing aircraft carriers to the shores of Libya and the costs of the global economy from increasing oil prices.
If we follow the classification of wars in terms of changing social formations and technologies used, we have now entered the era of wars of the seventh generation - information network, which resulted from the following factors: the development of computer equipment and communications, which led to an increase in the role of information in life a society that, by the effectiveness of its influence, has surpassed many material types of resources; the successes of psychology in the study of people's behavior and the management of their motivations, which made it possible to exert a given effect on large groups of people; the development of non-lethal means of replacing traditional species weapons.
Hidden, but effective threat
The traditional war against a state that possesses nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous in our time. Modern political technologists, serving the interests of the ruling elites of Western countries, are seeking to transfer aggression from the material space to the information one. First of all, the traditional values of the people are reoriented or destroyed so that the information attack from the outside is perceived by the given society as corresponding to its striving for progress. External aggression in the mass consciousness takes the form of a civilizational transformation of a backward society to others at a higher stage of development.
Technologies of network wars were well developed during the Cold War as a form of total destruction of the geopolitical enemy. Informational network war consists in undermining and subsequent destruction of the basic characteristics of a nation, carried out mainly in a hidden form. Depending on the specific objectives of the impact on the enemy, one or another area of his public life may become a priority object of aggression.
The purpose of the information-network war is to assign most of the country's strategically important resources to the geopolitical aggressor. At the same time, the “transfer” of these resources to the aggressor is carried out by the elite of the victim country to a large extent voluntarily, since it is perceived not as a seizure, but as a path to development. This creates difficulty in recognizing the technology and methods of information-network war compared to the traditional one, as well as the lack of a timely response to the actions of the aggressor, since the victim does not have any measures to counter them. Moreover, if the results of the “hot” wars are challenged and revised over time (examples of this are the First and Second World Wars), then the results of the information-network war will not be revised until its aggressor authors lose their positions.
Signs of an attack
How these positions will be lost is currently unclear. The complexity of the issue lies in the fact that the front of the information-network war is located in the mental space of human society, in which the basic values of the nation-victim have already been replaced by psychological attitudes and myths of the aggressor. Mass consciousness is unable to recognize the fact of implantation of mental viruses in a timely manner. And the political and cultural elites, who became the object of the information-network war, lacking sufficient qualifications to identify informational aggression and organize an adequate response to the network enemy, are doomed to a crushing geopolitical defeat.
In fact, practically all public institutions, primarily the media and religious organizations, cultural institutions, non-governmental organizations, and public movements financed from abroad, are connected to the information-network war. Even scientists working under foreign grants contribute to the destruction of the state. All of them carry out the so-called distributed ataku, inflicting numerous point destructive attacks on the country's social system under the slogans of developing democracy and respect for human rights. Thanks to modern political technologies and accumulated experience of influencing the mass consciousness, the genocide of the population can be carried out without the use of gas chambers and mass executions. It is enough to create conditions for reducing fertility and increasing mortality.
Another feature of information network wars is the absence of a rigid hierarchy in the network structure of the aggressor. This is due to its heterogeneity, which is expressed in significant autonomy of state and non-state elements of this structure, where there are no pronounced vertical links. But there are numerous horizontal, the action of which is irregular. The lack of hierarchy and regularity of interaction does not allow to clearly identify the existence and activities of such a network structure.
driving forces
The source of energy for the considered network structures, it can be said “combustible”, is information that circulates in them, and peculiar “fuses” are the masters of the nodal points. An example of this is the social networking servers Facebook and Twitter, which are under the control of US intelligence agencies.
As the British The Guardian reported, advocacy work is already underway in the United States using Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The control center of this program is the United States Air Force McDill base in Florida, where 50 operators are involved, each of which controls about ten “agents of influence” registered in different countries of the world and leading the information war according to all the rules of political technologies of destruction of states. The cost of this program, according to the British newspaper, is estimated at 2,76 million dollars, providing for each of these fighters of the information war there is a convincing legend and protection measures against disclosure. According to the spokesman for the Central Command of the US Armed Forces, Bill Spix, any impact on the American audience is prohibited by the rules, which precludes the use of English. The information in the system is presented only in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, Farsi and some other languages depending on the target countries.
The identification and qualification of acts of information warfare are the task of the special services of each state that cares about its security. This is all the more important because, due to the unrevealed nature of information aggression, it is not perceived by society as a direct threat to the existence of the state. The expert community and intelligence agencies must show these threats, explaining them to the country's leadership to take appropriate measures.
Spheres and methods
The struggle is conducted in the following spaces: geographic - for establishing control over the territory through global (including space) information and intelligence systems; separatist movements and terrorist activity in various forms are encouraged in the enemy’s territory; the organization of popular unrest and "color revolutions"; economic - by imposing enslaving credits on the enemy, imposing an embargo, organizing economic sanctions and provocations; ideological - through slander, distortion of information, the substitution of concepts, the introduction of mental viruses and myths into the minds of the enemy’s population; network - due to hacker attacks and the introduction of computer viruses in computing and communication systems and databases.
Whatever the ultimate goal of an information-network war, the immediate task is always to make it difficult for people to access reliable information. The importance of this is explained by the fact that the efficiency and quality of decisions made at all levels directly depend on the completeness and reliability of the information provided.
The main methods of information confrontation.
1. Hiding critical information about the state of affairs in this area.
2. Immersion of valuable information into an array of so-called informational garbage in accordance with the principle of “hiding a leaf in the forest”.
3. Substitution of concepts or distortion of their meaning.
4. Distraction on insignificant events.
5. The use of concepts that are known to the public, but have not only definitions, but also significance.
6. Filing negative information that is better perceived by the audience than positive.
7. Reference to factors devoid of real meaning, as well as to incorrectly conducted sociological and marketing research.
8. The introduction of taboos on certain types of information, despite their well-known. This is done in order to avoid a broad discussion of issues and topics that are critical for certain structures.
9. Frank lie with the aim of preventing negative reaction of the population and foreign public.
10. In the arsenal of information wars there are such means as the "information bomb" and "information mine." The first serves as a detonator for the avalanche-like growth of the process in society, while the second is laid in advance and works during the process that has begun to bring it to its logical conclusion. The “information mines” were leaks from official government agencies or from sites like WikiLeaks.
A typical example of the use of technology information-network war are the uprisings of the masses in the countries of the Middle East. If in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, these technologies were not sufficiently manifested, then in Libya a “general run-through” of the wars of the seventh generation took place. The Libyan “revolution” appeared on the screens of the world media as a kind of simulator, a photo-replicated “copy without original”, the course of which was presented by global mass media without any correlation with reality, but in exact accordance with the script written by Western political technologists.
The Arab societies provoked to "revolutionary" speeches by information attacks from social networks Facebook and Twitter, caused a revolutionary wave in the Middle East. The explosion on Arab Street showed that social networks have become a “fuse” for the troubled atmosphere of the Middle East. In almost all countries involved in this whirlpool of events, a protest "flash mob" was organized by sending out messages about upcoming rallies and protests through social networks, email and mobile phones. It should be remembered that the managing servers of the global electronic networks Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail are located in the United States and are controlled by US intelligence agencies. This allows you to organize the sending of messages to a pre-selected "clientele" - to their agents of influence in the countries of the Arab East, who, from a signal from the outside, collect a critical mass of people at the right time in the right place using the so-called word of mouth.
The people of the Arab street, most of whom know nothing about the Internet, social networks, and often not having computers and cell phones, are ready to beat shop windows, burn cars and throw stones at the police, because they felt they had the opportunity to get even with the power of the poor. which they were doomed to the ruling regimes. The security services of the invaded states were powerless to resist violence in a new form of organization of the protest movement, which immediately acquired an avalanche-like, uncontrollable character. It turned out that it was impossible to foresee the beginning of street riots, as well as the sources for sending inflammatory messages, and disabling access to the Internet and mobile communications after the outbreak of riots did not solve anything, since the process had become a wildfire.
Social support
The modern world is explosively saturated with people with a highly inharmonized inner world. “Young lumps”, as sociologists call them, are a declassed mass with unrevealed social roots, without clear moral concepts and political guidelines. The activity of such elements in everyday life extends from the usual commercial fever to speculation in the stock and currency markets. With the growth of a revolutionary situation, their anti-systemic protest charge, which develops against the background of unrealized ambitions, increases.
So it was in the case of self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi - a Tunisian young man with a higher education who was forced to trade vegetables. Such people, being in constant search of their place in life, essentially become puppets, falling under the influence of social networks, crowd moods or ideologies of radical movements. And if they have no inner moral core, then it is impossible to imagine which motives will prevail in the next moment.
Mass media and information on social networks, covering such events, further intensify the atmosphere of mass psychosis. This is facilitated by shots taken by cell phone cameras with no one knows where, reports of the numerous victims who fell at the hands of government forces but were not shown “for humane reasons”, reports from cities allegedly captured by the rebels, indiscriminate firing of anti-aircraft machine guns to demonstrate the situation of the fighting action, wreckage of allegedly shot down government aircraft aviationthat bombed the rebels, the "transition" to the side of the people of Gaddafi's son, the flight of Libyan diplomats to the United States and France. However, if you look closely, you can see that a virtual war is being played out in the media, mounted and retouched on computers and thrown into virtual space as information chewing gum to justify UN Security Council sanctions.
If Tunisia and Egypt were the first samples of transatlantic directors of this pseudo-revolutionary performance, then Libya is the first real combat operation of the world information network war of the West against undesirable regimes. While in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington uses all the means and methods of global redistribution of the world, with the goal of changing leaders in countries that are of strategic interest to the United States, then in the states of the Middle East, the West initiates bringing to power the leaders of a new generation, replacing those Those who received education in the USSR are technocrats of the western formation and western mentality, who are called upon to strengthen the position of the United States while at the same time pushing China, the EU, and Russia. This is an example of an attempt to implement an information-network strategy of "controlled chaos", which turned out to be a new means of preserving global American leadership with minimal financial costs, except for the costs of advancing aircraft carriers to the shores of Libya and the costs of the global economy from increasing oil prices.
Information