Shooting The Messenger II
Partly due a post of mine the Counterterrorism Blog attempts to defend and continue its misguided march against Google News indexing Al Manar. What this attempt is designed to do is unclear – getting rid of the middle man does not actually do anything. It is the equivalent of shooting a TV – the network doesn’t stop broadcasting – nor do they lose a significant part of their target market (in this case www.almanar.com still exists). It reeks of flag waving paranoia (as evidenced by its clueless supporters).
The kicker is: most of these guys decried Google when it “sold out” to China.
What this effort actually does is illustrate a deficiency on the part of counterterror experts* the world over – they are facing the same rule set shift the CIA is as illustrated here –
Simply put, the CIA and the government as a whole are having a hard time dealing with broadband international connectivity and the sheer amount of associated information. People whose lives have revolved around controlling and manipulating information are now being forced to adapt to an environment where they simply can not.
Denying Americans information about terrorists (yes, even directly from a terrorist entity) is a Doom Loop exercise – explanation here – in an effort to continue “their” attempts at providing security they lose sight of the customer’s needs – “us”. They will not be able to prevent all or even a majority of attacks, this is the nature of fourth and fifth generation warfare. A well informed public is an aware public is one that can effectively comprehend and react to a potential threat.
Those calling for this course of action were irrelevant on 9/11, will be irrelevant when a nuclear weapon detonates on American soil (the last symbolic terrorist attack) and will be relics when global guerrillas utilize open source networks to attack our critical systems. (Look out, Google indexes all three of these sites, which are potentially beneficial to terrorists!)
*I use the term “counterterror expert” loosely. The entire community is quickly becoming a white elephant as it focuses on organizational terror while it is being rapidly supplanted by open source terror. Mainstream just doesn’t get it. (Too long a collective OODA loop).
-Shlok
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