Call me old fashioned
But I can't help but feel carpet bombing would be a more effective strategy.
A new British Army unit will embrace web-enabled psyops and cyber-warfare to fight against the message of groups such as ISIS in cyberspace. The 77th Brigade is due to launch in April with 1,500 personnel, including regular soldiers, sailors and airmen as well as part-time reservists. Desirable skills for would-be recruits …
How much of this stuff is already going on. Maybe not in a military context, but a political one.
Those Daily Mail comments. Are they genuine, or Tory party shills. Or Labour party activists ?
Those BBC HYS posters. Are they really what they say they are. Or plants to give the appearance of public dissent/support (delete as applicable) ?
Some are, some are genuine loonies! Astroturfing is big business.
I think you will see this, albeit in a smaller form, here in the comments section. Comments in various articles seem to have a trending in upvotes or downvotes and also comments depending on the topic. I'm not just speaking of Apple, MS, Google, etc. themes but bring in politics or snooping and there is some obvious pattern. Damned if I know what it is... maybe just trolls, or shills, or even a bot.
Has anyone asked how do the actual chindit regiment feel about this rebrand?
Not at all sure myself, the original chindits were formed and fought out of bases india in the most horrible conditions of ww2, often deep in jungle territory inside burma often cut off from supplies or support for weeks on end, suffering malaria and side effects with each small team equipped with a mule to carry the team member that was sickest that day, which was permanently occupied. The japanese were a cruel enemy to be captured and would often cut off limbs with tattoo's and treat any POWS extremely badly as they considered them cowards.
I can recount many other tales which attribute to the grit of the regiment and the men which made it up as I'm the offspring of a heavily tattoo'd ex chindit (and the entire regiment went out and got tattoo's when they got this warning from their CO in defiance to the enemy, thats the kind of spirit they had, or were a daft bunch of blokes as my mum used to say when the topic of drawing on yourself permanently came up). I can't ask my dad as the side effects resulted in massive health problems and he fell to them eventually when I was a youngster.
I know about security at a low level, I'd happily play my part supporting whatever is needed from a technical point of view and I am not unskilled in the area, but I wouldn't want to go associating mealymouthed psyops done by blog postings by graduates tucked safely away in cube farms with the history of what my dad and others of his ilk did. Just doesn't seem right.
Anon, because, intent is not to stir up any resentment to other nations.
I though exactly the same; struck me as either some kind of heavy-handed 'military humour' or a rather crass political decision within the MOD; it's not like it's hard to come up with a 'new' unit number, after all, and not try to draw a clumsy linkage between a genuinely ballsy unit of real warriors, and Twits
(and if we're going to do historical references, the Bible-verses-on-sniper-scopes thing did it better...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trijicon_biblical_verses_controversy
> We're getting a British Army PsiOps unit? That's so bad-ass.
Sigh. Why must you tease me? A secret unit of Scanners that make jihadists head a splode from a distance would be so much cooler than a secret unit of desk pilots posting LOL U SUX on a jihadist message board.
that many other countries have similar units, some defensive, some not.
Many also tolerate sites that are hotbeds for nationalistic trolling and hacking.
Israel seems to be the keenest on stealing commercial and industrial secrets, including from their benefactors in the USA.
The USA is pretty keen on stealing that and diplomatic info. from everywhere but Israel. They already know pretty well what Israel has as far as military tech., because much of it was stolen from the US.
This new unit as described sounds more like Israel's Internet megaphone than anything else, differences being that it is under army control instead of Interior Ministry (Home Office for the British) control.
Why would a troll operation (albeit in a good cause, except that it is impossible to forget the UK govt's role in creating the hellish conditions in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and other places in central to northern Africa, and the groups this '77' is said to be intended to troll) be made an army regiment?
Maybe the intention for the members in uniform is entirely different from the stated intention.
This 77 designation is also an insult to the soldiers who risked all fighting the equally brave soldiers of the Imperial Army.
I'm finding this rather odd. Why the army? Why not civil servants, spooks and such? It's not as if they are going to order these people to attack a hill or whatever, surely military discipline is totally unnecessary when all you are faced with is facebook. Also, are highly trained squaddies who can shoot people in the face etc, going to be best employed sat behind a web browser? Not seeing why this is necessary at all, plenty of civil servants with security clearance, and expanding their number would be easy. Or, is this about getting this done as part of the defence budget, thus it being a real terms cut for defence? Baffling.
Always good for a read is what the Brit Army's unofficial social media thinks of the situation
http://www.arrse.co.uk/community/threads/the-chindits-are-back.225808/
I do like the comment on page 4
"Is it a good sign when an information operation outfit starts off by oddly appropriating the name of a respected behind the lines mob from WWII? It's a bit like when they put a MG badge on a Mini Metro. "
So they get someone like Matt Bryant to add the 13,147st comment to a major news article, that's supposed to be some kind of blow for freeedom? Once the noise to signal ratio rockets past 1,000% and the forum is basically overgrown with astroweeds, reclaimed by the astrojungle, who would they think remains to be influenced, is there anyone spending their days hyper obsessively reading every inane talking point comment? Will it be like an auto trading stock market crash, where everyone and their dog / blog squad has to keep up their pro/anti comment ratios and basically ddos all of the internets? How many major news outlets have a comments section where it's worth anything to read past the first 2 or 3 comments that show? How many more specialized forums like this one don't just laugh jokers like this off the stage? Up until there are just too many of them to bother with comments anymore...
I'd really like to see an organization like our esteemed paper of record The Register for example do some commenter analysis, and brand astrowarrior posts with the logo of the gang of thugs who spawned them based on IP addresses. I guess that wouldn't help sell ads though?
What you bet it does nothing to the nasty terror-ists but its remit spreads to cover internal treats such as; Much-in-th-Marsh against Windmills, or the Womens Institute - not saying they are threat but its so much easier for the authorities to target the law abiding rather than Crims or those terror thingies