China sees a partnership with Russia as a way to challenge, and potentially weaken, the United States, a new threat assessment said.
Archive for category: #Imperialism #Multipolar
President Biden has not acted to resolve a dispute that pits the Defense Department against other agencies.
U.S. Special Operations Command, responsible for some of the country’s most secretive military endeavors, is gearing up to conduct internet propaganda and deception campaigns online using deepfake videos, according to federal contracting documents reviewed by The Intercept.
The plans, which also describe hacking internet-connected devices to eavesdrop in order to assess foreign populations’ susceptibility to propaganda, come at a time of intense global debate over technologically sophisticated “disinformation” campaigns, their effectiveness, and the ethics of their use.
While the U.S. government routinely warns against the risk of deepfakes and is openly working to build tools to counter them, the document from Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, represents a nearly unprecedented instance of the American government — or any government — openly signaling its desire to use the highly controversial technology offensively.
SOCOM’s next generation propaganda aspirations are outlined in a procurement document that lists capabilities it’s seeking for the near future and soliciting pitches from outside parties that believe they’re able to build them.
“When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire,” Chris Meserole, head of the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, told The Intercept. “At a time when digital propaganda is on the rise globally, the U.S. should be doing everything it can to strengthen democracy by building support for shared notions of truth and reality. Deepfakes do the opposite. By casting doubt on the credibility of all content and information, whether real or synthetic, they ultimately erode the foundation of democracy itself.”
“When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire.”
Meserole added, “If deepfakes are going to be leveraged for targeted military and intelligence operations, then their use needs to be subject to review and oversight.”
The pitch document, first published by SOCOM’s Directorate of Science and Technology in 2020, established a wish list of next-generation toys for the 21st century special forces commando, a litany of gadgets and futuristic tools that will help the country’s most elite soldiers more effectively hunt and kill their targets using lasers, robots, holographs, and other sophisticated hardware.
Last October, SOCOM quietly released an updated version of its wish list with a new section: “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO),” a Pentagon euphemism for its global propaganda and deception efforts.
The added paragraph spells out SOCOM’s desire to obtain new and improved means of carrying out “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.” SOCOM is seeking “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations.”
SOCOM typically fights in the shadows, but its public reputation and global footprint loom large. Comprised of the elite units from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force, SOCOM leads the most sensitive military operations of the world’s most lethal nation.
While American special forces are widely known for splashy exploits like the Navy SEALs’ killing of Osama bin Laden, their history is one of secret missions, subterfuge, sabotage, and disruption campaigns. SOCOM’s “next generation” disinformation ambitions are only part of a long, vast history of deception efforts on the part of the U.S. military and intelligence apparatuses.
Special Operations Command, which is accepting proposals on these capabilities through 2025, did not respond to a request for comment.
Though Special Operations Command has for years coordinated foreign “influence operations,” these deception campaigns have come under renewed scrutiny. In December, The Intercept reported that SOCOM had convinced Twitter, in violation of its internal policies, to permit a network of sham accounts that spread phony news items of dubious accuracy, including a claim that the Iranian government was stealing the organs of Afghan civilians. Though the Twitter-based propaganda offensive didn’t use of deepfakes, researchers found that Pentagon contractors employed machine learning-generated avatars to lend the fake accounts a degree of realism.
Provocatively, the updated capability document reveals that SOCOM wants to boost these internet deception efforts with the use of “next generation” deepfake videos, an increasingly effective method of generating lifelike digital video forgeries using machine learning. Special forces would use this faked footage to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels,” the document adds.
While deepfakes have largely remained fodder for entertainment and pornography, the potential for more dire applications is real. At the onset of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, a shoddy deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordering troops to surrender began circulating on social media channels. Ethical considerations aside, the legality of militarized deepfakes in a conflict, which remains an open question, is not addressed in the SOCOM document.
As with foreign governmental “disinformation” campaigns, the U.S. has spent the past several years warning against the potent national security threat represented by deepfakes. The use of deepfakes to deliberately deceive, government authorities warn regularly, could have a deeply destabilizing effect on civilian populations exposed to them.
At the federal level, however, the conversation has revolved exclusively around the menace foreign-made deepfakes might pose to the U.S., not the other way around. Previously reported contracting documents show SOCOM has sought technologies to detect deepfake-augmented internet campaigns, a tactic it now wants to unleash on its own.
Perhaps as provocative as the mention of deepfakes is the section that follows, which notes SOCOM wishes to finely tune its offensive propaganda seemingly by spying on the intended audience through their internet-connected devices.
Described as a “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (loT) devices for collect [sic] data and information from local populaces to enable breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received,” the document says that the ability to eavesdrop on propaganda targets “would enable MISO to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by local populace.” In 2017, WikiLeaks published pilfered CIA files that revealed a roughly similar capability to hijack into household devices.
The technology behind deepfake videos first arrived in 2017, spurred by a combination of cheap, powerful computer hardware and research breakthroughs in machine learning. Deepfake videos are typically made by feeding images of an individual to a computer and using the resultant computerized analysis to essentially paste a highly lifelike simulacrum of that face onto another.
“The capacity for societal harm is certainly there.”
Once the software has been sufficiently trained, its user can crank out realistic fabricated footage of a target saying or doing virtually anything. The technology’s ease of use and increasing accuracy has prompted fears of an era in which the global public can no longer believe what it sees with its own eyes.
Though major social platforms like Facebook have rules against deepfakes, given the inherently fluid and interconnected nature of the internet, Pentagon-disseminated deepfakes might also risk flowing back to the American homeland.
“If it’s a nontraditional media environment, I could imagine the form of manipulation getting pretty far before getting stopped or rebuked by some sort of local authority,” Max Rizzuto, a deepfakes researcher with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Intercept. “The capacity for societal harm is certainly there.”
SOCOM’s interest in deploying deepfake disinformation campaigns follows recent years of international anxiety about forged videos and digital deception from international adversaries. Though there’s scant evidence Russia’s efforts to digitally sway the 2016 election had any meaningful effect, the Pentagon has expressed an interest in redoubling its digital propaganda capabilities, lest it fall behind, with SOCOM taking on a crucial role.
At an April 2018 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Kenneth Tovo of the Army Special Operations Command assured the assembled senators that American special forces were working to close the propaganda gap.
“We have invested fairly heavily in our psy-op operators,” he said, “developing new capabilities, particularly to deal in the digital space, social media analysis and a variety of different tools that have been fielded by SOCOM that allow us to evaluate the social media space, evaluate the cyber domain, see trend analysis, where opinion is moving, and then how to potentially influence that environment with our own products.”
While military propaganda is as old as war itself, deepfakes have frequently been discussed as a sui generis technological danger, the existence of which poses a civilizational threat.
At a 2018 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing discussing the nomination of William Evanina to run the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said of deepfakes, “I believe this is the next wave of attacks against America and Western democracies.” Evanina, in response, reassured Rubio that the U.S. intelligence community was working to counter the threat of deepfakes.
The Pentagon is also reportedly hard at work countering the foreign deepfake threat. According to a 2018 news report, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military’s tech research division, has spent tens of millions of dollars developing methods to detect deepfaked imagery. Similar efforts are underway throughout the Department of Defense.
In 2019, Rubio and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., wrote 11 American internet companies urging them to draft policies to detect and remove deepfake videos. “If the public can no longer trust recorded events or images,” read the letter, “it will have a corrosive impact on our democracy.”
Nestled within the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 was a directive instructing the Pentagon to complete an “intelligence assessment of the threat posed by foreign government and non-state actors creating or using machine-manipulated media (commonly referred to as ‘deep fakes’),” including “how such media has been used or might be used to conduct information warfare.”
Just a couple years later, American special forces seem to be gearing up to conduct the very same.
“It’s a dangerous technology,” said Rizzuto, the Atlantic Council researcher.
“You can’t moderate this tech the way we approach other sorts of content on the internet,” he said. “Deepfakes as a technology have more in common with conversations around nuclear nonproliferation.”
The post U.S. Special Forces Want to Use Deepfakes for Psy-ops appeared first on The Intercept.
Most Christians probably think of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace,” foretold in Isaiah 9:6, so the idea of “Jesus the military leader” might seem a bit odd—but not for Christian nationalists, particularly those involved in parachurch organizations that prey on the military.
One such individual in one such organization, Cadence International, has just been blocked from attempting to convert 112 subordinates via a mandatory military training titled, “Leadership Lessons of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Swift action by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) put an end to the attempt. But the mere fact that such a clear violation occurred is a troubling reflection of deep-seated problems which the Biden administration has done little, if anything to correct, MRFF President and CEO Mikey Weinstein told Crooks and Liars.
“We’re just not seeing the Biden dividend,” Weinstein said, despite the fact that “Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austen said he wanted to be—these aren’t my words—he wanted to be the lodestar for racial and religious diversity in DoD.” Of course, “It’s overall far better than we when we had the narcissistic, egotistical, cowardly, idiot racist as president, in Trump,” he said. “But clarity of separation of church and state, which everyone swears an oath to when they join the military? We’re not seeing it.”
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“If we don’t get rid of the machines, we’re going to lose our country to the world,” Lindell told crowds, referring to voting machines which he previously claimed resulted in voting errors and a ‘stolen’ election.
CEO of MyPillow Mike Lindell is now due to address CPAC. Stay tuned as we bring you the latest updates.
While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical lesson that bears repeating at this dangerous moment in history: when nations prepare for war, they are far more likely to go to war. In The Guns of August, her magisterial account of another conflict nobody wanted, Barbara Tuchman attributed the start of World War I in 1914 to French and German plans already in place. “Appalled upon the brink,” she wrote, “the chiefs of state who would be… Read more
Source: At the Brink of War in the Pacific? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
By Pepe Escobar – Feb 22, 2023
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s much awaited address to the Russian Federal Assembly on Tuesday should be interpreted as a tour de force of sovereignty.
The address, significantly, marked the first anniversary of Russia’s official recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, only a few hours before 22 February, 2022. In myriad ways, what happened a year ago also marked the birth of the real, 21st century multipolar world.
Then two days later, Moscow launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine to defend said republics.
Cool, calm, collected, without a hint of aggression, Putin’s speech painted Russia as an ancient, independent, and quite distinct civilization – sometimes following a path in concert with other civilizations, sometimes in divergence.
Ukraine, part of Russian civilization, now happens to be occupied by western civilization, which Putin said “became hostile to us,” like in a few instances in the past. So the acute phase of what is essentially a war by proxy of the west against Russia takes place over the body of Russian civilization.
That explains Putin’s clarification that “Russia is an open country, but an independent civilization – we do not consider ourselves superior but we inherited our civilization from our ancestors and we must pass it on.”
A war dilacerating the body of Russian civilization is a serious existential business. Putin also made clear that “Ukraine is being used as a tool and testing ground by the west against Russia.” Thus the inevitable follow-up: “The more long-range weapons are sent to Ukraine, the longer we have to push the threat away from our borders.”
Translation: this war will be long – and painful. There will be no swift victory with minimal loss of blood. The next moves around the Dnieper may take years to solidify. Depending on whether US policy continues to cleave to neo-con and neoliberal objectives, the frontline may be displaced to Lviv. Then German politics may change. Normal trade with France and Germany may be recovered only by the end of the next decade.
Highlights of President Putin’s Speech 1 Year Into Military Operation in Ukraine
Kremlin exasperation: START is finished
All that brings us to the games played by the Empire of Lies. Says Putin: “The promises…of western rulers turned into forgery and cruel lies. The west supplied weapons, trained nationalist battalions. Even before the start of the SMO, there were negotiations…on the supply of air defense systems… We remember Kyiv’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons.”
Putin made it clear, once again, that the element of trust between Russia and the west, especially the US, is gone. So it’s a natural decision for Russia to “withdraw from the treaty on strategic offensive weapons, but we don’t do it officially. For now we are only halting our participation to the START treaty. No US inspections in our nuclear sites can be allowed.”
As an aside, of the three main US-Russian weapons treaties, Washington abandoned two of these: The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was dumped by the administration of former president George W. Bush in 2002, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was nixed by former president Donald Trump in 2019.
This shows the Kremlin’s degree of exasperation. Putin is even prepared to order the Ministry of Defense and Rosatom to get ready to test Russian nuclear weapons if the US goes first along the same road.
If that’s the case, Russia will be forced to completely break parity in the nuclear sphere, and abandon the moratorium on nuclear testing and cooperation with other nations when it comes to the production of nuclear weapons. So far, the US and NATO game consisted in opening a little window allowing them to inspect Russian nuclear sites.
With his judo move, Putin returns the pressure onto the White House.
The US and NATO will not be exactly thrilled when Russia starts testing its new strategic weapons, especially the post-doomsday Poseidon – the largest nuclear-powered torpedo ever deployed, capable of triggering terrifying radioactive ocean swells.
On the economic front: Bypassing the US dollar is the essential play towards multipolarity. During his speech, Putin made a point to extol the resilience of the Russian economy: “Russian GDP in 2022 decreased only by 2.1 percent, estimates of the opposing side did not become reality, they said 15, 20 percent.” That resilience gives Russia enough room to “work with partners to make the system of international settlements independent of the US dollar and other western currencies. The dollar will lose its universal role.”
On geoeconomics: Putin went all out in praise of economic corridors, from West Asia to South Asia: “New corridors, transport routes will be built towards the East, this is the region where we will focus our development, new highways to Kazakhstan and China, new North-South corridor to Pakistan, Iran.”
And those will connect to Russia developing “the ports of the Black and Azov Seas, it’s necessary to build logistics corridors within the country.” The result will be a progressive interconnection with the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) whose principals include Iran and India, and eventually China’s mega-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
China’s plan for global security
It’s inevitable that apart from sketching several state policies geared towards Russia’s internal development – one might even compare them to socialist policies – a great deal of Putin’s address had to focus on the NATO vs. Russia war till-the-last-Ukrainian.
Putin remarked on how “our relations with the west have degraded, and this is entirely the fault of the United States;” how NATO’s goal is to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia; and how the warmongering frenzy had forced him, a week ago, to sign a decree “putting new ground-based strategic complexes on combat duty.”
So it’s no accident that the US ambassador was immediately summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs right after Putin’s address.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Ambassador Lynne Tracey in no uncertain terms that Washington must take concrete measures: among them, to remove all US and NATO military forces and equipment away from Ukraine. In a stunning move, he demanded a detailed explanation of the destruction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, as well as a halt to US interference in an independent inquiry to identify the responsible parties.
Keeping the momentum in Moscow, top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi met with secretary of Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, before talking to Lavrov and Putin. Patrushev remarked, “the course towards developing a strategic partnership with China is an absolute priority for Russia’s foreign policy.” Wang Yi, not so cryptically, added, “Moscow and Beijing need to synchronize their watches.”
The Americans are doing everything to try and pre-empt the Chinese proposal for a de-escalation in Ukraine. China’s plan should be presented this Friday, and there’s a serious risk Beijing may fall into a trap set by the western plutocracy.
Too many Chinese “concessions” to Russia, and not as many to Ukraine, may be spun to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing (Divide and Rule, which is always the US Plan A. There’s no Plan B).
Sensing the waters, the Chinese themselves decided to take the offensive, presenting a Global Security Initiative Concept Paper.
The problem is Beijing still attributes too much clout to a toothless UN, when they refer to“formulating a New Agenda for Peace and other proposals put forth in Our Common Agenda by the UN Secretary-General.”
Same when Beijing upholds the consensus that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Try to explain that to the Straussian neo-con psychos in the Beltway, who know nothing about war, much less nuclear ones.
The Chinese affirm the necessity to “comply with the joint statement on preventing nuclear war and avoiding arms races issued by leaders of the five nuclear-weapon states in January 2022.” And to “strengthen dialogue and cooperation among nuclear-weapon states to reduce the risk of nuclear war.”
Bets can be made that Patrushev explained in detail to Wang Yi how that is just wishful thinking. The “logic “of the current collective western “leadership” has been expressed, among others, by irredeemable mediocrity Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general: even nuclear war is preferable to a Russian victory in Ukraine.
Putin’s measured but firm address has made it clear that the stakes keep getting higher. And it all revolves on how deep Russia’s – and China’s – “strategic ambiguity” are able to petrify a paranoid west flirting with mushroom clouds.
Campism generally splits the world into two antagonistic orders, or great ‘camps’ – in simplistic terms, it is the split between the camp of capitalism and the camp of socialism; the great Cold War rivalry between the United States, its NATO allies and (neo)colonies, versus the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics and its Iron Curtain More
The post Campism and the War in Ukraine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
Former Russian president, prime minister, and current Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev issued a new round of threats to the West on Monday that the continued supply of arms to Ukraine will lead to atomic armageddon.
Friday marked the start of the second year of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, which has devolved into a “meat grinder” of attrition peppered with war crimes committed against the Ukrainians by Putin’s troops.
Putin began taunting the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization with nuclear annihilation shortly after he launched his illegal invasion, and the rhetoric has periodically been reiterated by the Kremlin and its propagandists on state television. But tensions escalated last week when Putin withdrew from the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – potentially triggering a revamped arms race – while President Joe Biden embarked on a surprise visit to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
READ MORE: ‘Dangerous and reckless’: Putin halts Russia’s participation in nuclear treaty with US
“If the United States conducts tests, then we will. No one should have dangerous illusions that global strategic parity can be destroyed,” Putin said in an address. He further alleged that the US and NATO “intend to transform a local conflict into a phase of global confrontation” and that “this is exactly how we understand it all and we will react accordingly because in this case, we are talking about the existence of our country.”
Putin has also claimed that the survival of Russia itself is contingent upon his successful conquest of Ukraine, which Medvedev – one of Putin’s closest allies – channeled in his latest saber-rattling.
“Of course, the pumping in of weapons can continue …. and prevent any possibility of reviving negotiations,” Medvedev said according to a Reuters report. “Our enemies are doing just that, not wanting to understand that their goals will certainly lead to a total fiasco. Loss for everyone. A collapse. Apocalypse. Where you forget for centuries about your former life, until the rubble ceases to emit radiation.”
Russia’s prior similar remarks were denounced by the West, and the US has made it clear that the consequences for Putin would be “severe” if he shatters the nuclear taboo. And although the odds of that happening are low, Zelenskyy has cautioned that Putin “is not bluffing.”
READ MORE: Is civilization at stake in Ukraine?
What century is this, anyway? How a long-ago split in the Marxist left helps to explain the Ukraine conundrum