US Army Information Warfare Division

While some people go out of their way to talk about other – non-friendly – countries conducting information warfare ops, it is useful to understand that everyone does it and that includes us.

Just one example. The U.S. has many of these examples.

The U.S. Army Cyber Command told defense contractors it planned to surveil global social media use to defend the “NATO brand” in a recording of a webinar reviewed by the media. That call, which came a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, comes after people have gotten spun up by others doing that to us.

The call, by invitation only, was hosted by the Cyber Fusion Innovation Center, a nonprofit sponsored by the Defense Department.

They were looking for private sector contractors interested in SELLING data to Army Cyber Command.

Among their responsibilities is to detect and thwart foreign influence operations, AKA propaganda, while engaging in it themselves.

The March 2022 webinar’s purpose was to bring together vendors that could help the Army “attack, defend, influence and operate”.

The Army wanted to know what the private sector thought was possible to analyze the huge volumes of data they want to ingest.

The Army wants to track social media “in places where the U.S. had an interest”. That includes places like Twitter, but also VK, Telegram, Sina Weibo and others. Some of those live in countries “less friendly” to us like China and Russia, but others, like Twitter, are both local and global.

They said that they were interested in purchasing nonpublic commercial data, corporate ownership information, supply chain data and more.

Before people get upset, this is the same data that the same companies sell to anyone who wants it, since the U.S. has limited privacy laws (just 8 states have any form of second generation privacy law and half of those are not in effect quite yet).

I like how they call this managing brand reputation. Army Cyber’s responsibilities include offense and propaganda. The 1st information operations command provides social media overwatch and the Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command works to gain and maintain information dominance by conducting Information Warfare in the Information Environment.

So as we watch what the other guys are doing, bear in mind that we do the same.

Just so you understand. Credit: The Intercept

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