In a post, Citizen Lab Post-Doctoral Fellow Eneken Tikk reflects on the US-Yemen cyber war panic after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference Dinner on 23 May.
See below for an excerpt:
Another cyber war hysteria is loose. This time, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference Gala Dinner in Tampa, FL, on the night of Wednesday, May 23, 2012, hit the cyber panic fan. Mrs. Clinton was giving an example of how the State Department is becoming more operational, strategic, expeditionary and focused contesting the online space, media websites and forums where al-Qa’ida and its affiliates spread its propaganda and recruit supporters.
Explaining an operation by the recently established inter-agency Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, Secretary Clinton was careful in choosing words: ”A couple of weeks ago, al-Qa’ida’s affiliate in Yemen began an advertising campaign on key tribal websites, bragging about killing Americans and trying to recruit new supporters. Within 48 hours, our team plastered the same sites with altered versions of the ads that showed the toll Al-Qaida attacks have taken on the Yemeni people, and we can tell our efforts are starting to have an impact because we monitor extremists are publicly venting their frustration and asking their supporters not to believe everything they read on the internet”.
Read the full piece here.