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[FUTUREWAR / POPULAR DEFENSE] [TEN SCENES] >>>>
international |
sci-tech |
opinion/analysis
Wednesday February 16, 2005 22:05 by Various
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[FOR INDYMEDIA IRELAND'S FILM CRRRRITTTIIICCCSSS] [INTRODUCTION]
"The Gulf War was the first 'live' war. World War Two was a world war in space. It spread from Europe to Japan, to the Soviet Union, etc. World War Two was quite different from World War One which was geographically limited to Europe. But in the case of the Gulf War, we are dealing with a war which is extremely local in space, but global in time, since it is the first 'live' war. And to those, like my friend Baudrillard, who say that this war did not actually occur, I reply: this war may not have occurred in the actual global space, but it did occur in global time. And this thanks to CNN and the Pentagon. This is a new form of war, and all future wars, all future accidents will be live wars and live accidents." (Virilio]
In his book ' War in the Age of Intelligent Machines’, Manuel De Landa traces the way in which sudden epistemic technological developments, at the level of the underlying machinic paradigm, can and do routinely set the ‘Art of War’ into a state of flux, unleashing processes in which a group of previously disconnected elements reach a critical point at which they begin to co-operate to form a higher level entity or entities. Paul Virilio, an obvious influence on DeLanda, sketches out such an epistemic development throughout his work, and posits it as beginning with the end of the period of the Cold War and the eclipse of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. He sees the end of deterrence corresponding to the beginning of war based primarily on information and taking place globally in real time through military Satellite Surveillance, 24 News Television and Computer Networks including the Civilian Internet.
A survey of the literature in the area shows there to be a broad agreement that the late 20th and early 21st Century marks the onset of a state of flux where technological developments are revolutionising conceptions of warfare. Terms such as 'The Revolution in Military Affairs', 'Infowar', '4th Generation Warfare', 'Netwar', 'Asymmetric War' all point towards a redefinition of what war entails and a redefinition of the nature of the territory on which it occurs. Two linked contemporary events - the attack on the Twin Towers and The Gulf War Redux - have served to bring the various analyses of thinkers in this area, be they military theorists, media theorists or critical theorists, into sharper focus. Both events unfolded 'live' everywhere and in a peculiar globalised nowhere simultaneously. Both appeared as fundamentally constructed, mediated, virtual and geographically un-tethered. Both marked definitively the onset of the globalisation of perception and the globalisation of 'Netwar/Infowar'.
I am going to sketch out ten scenes in a possible documentary history of ‘Netwar/Infowar/Futurewar’ and the impact of new technologies on conceptions of ‘territory’ and ‘popular defense’ in such a deterritorialized conflict, or in, as Subcommandante Marcos terms it, the Fourth World War. He conceptualises the totalizing nature of neo-liberal capitalism as the belligerent power in the 4th World War with ‘the multitudes who resist’ as the undeclared enemy. His analysis, originally circulated in 1997 seems prophetic as the Global Anti-War Protests of February 2003 built themselves on the tentative global networks established in the last ten years by a consciously and consciously globalised resistance to the globalisation of neo-liberalism. The circle completed itself when the undeclared connection between the ‘War on Terror’ and the ‘’Fourth World War’ manifested itself in the early months of 2004 at the Republican National Convention in New York. Anti-War and Anti Corporate Globalisation activists and their networks of communication faced off against a media operation run by the recent director of US Military communications at CENTCOM in Doha.
[SCENE # 1] [MILLENIUM CHALLENGE] [AUG 01] >>>>
The Millennium Challenge, as you all surely remember, was the biggest war game of all time. It had been planned for two years and involved integrated operations by the army, navy, air force and marines. The exercises were part real, with 13,000 troops spread across the United States, supported by actual planes and warships; and part virtual, generated by sophisticated computer models. It was the same technique used in Hollywood blockbusters such as Gladiator. The soldiers in the foreground were real, the legions behind entirely digital. The game was theoretically set in 2007 and pitted Blue forces (the US) against a country called Red. Red was a militarily powerful Middle Eastern nation on the Persian Gulf that was home to a crazed but cunning megalomaniac (played by Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper). According to the UK Guardian, Riper used a series of USS Cole-type and other such attacks to sink 16 ships, kill thousands of Marines, and bring the invasion to a startling halt before it even really began. At that point, faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this cheating that he refused to play any more. Instead, he sat on the sidelines making abrasive remarks until the three-week war game - grandiosely entitled Millennium Challenge - staggered to a star-spangled conclusion on August 15, with a US "victory". Stranger things have happened. As Riper puts it: "A phrase I heard over and over was: 'That would never have happened,'" Van Riper recalls. "And I said: nobody would have thought that anyone would fly an airliner into the World Trade Centre... but nobody seemed interested."
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Full-spectrum dominance, Goff explains, is the key term in a Defense Department blueprint issued during the Clinton administration. "Full spectrum" refers to three things: geographic scope, level of conflict and technology. "This is a doctrine that implicitly aims at world military domination, taking on everything from street riots to thermonuclear war, accomplished with a blank check to weapons developers for an array of highly sophisticated gadgets," Goff says. This is also the doctrine from which the Bush administration adapted the military strategy for the invasion of Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld added a few new wrinkles to the theory, including substituting formulaic digital thought for human leadership, Goff says. "This dramatically increasing and ever more exclusive reliance on technology in fact carries with it a corresponding increase of latent disorder that can happen abruptly in a kind of tectonic shift," he explains.
[SCENE # 2] [CYBERWAR PALESTINE] [MAR 02] >>>>
Sunday March 31 , 2002 at 10:49AM
- Our zionist hacker friend wants to hear from you ... the IP address is 212 .199.191.221
- Trying whois for 212 .199.191.221
- Connection established.
- hackers; open ports
- Interesting ports on (212.199.191.221):
- ALERT: hacker is not properly firewalled
- NOTE: our hacker friend, no matter what IP they end up on, is NOT, REPEAT NOT, firewalled against icmp_echoes .... have fun everyone!!!!
- ZIONIST HACK ATTEMPT AVERTED, COUNTERATTACK INITIATED
- Zionist Hacker IP is Updated. It is now:212 .199.191. 79
- I wish I knew enough about computers to counter attack too. Get the fascist!
- A traceroute leads back to Idaho to a company called ezcoding.com.
Ezcoding has a staff with the following skill sets: ASP, COM, COM+, C/C++, VB, VC++, MFCs, Networking, System administration,development, application, web, SQL, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, HTML, UNIX,Linux, Windows NT server. Project summary:Department of Defense Contracting (Site Not available to public and classified)
THE ABOVE IS RIPPED FROM THEIR SITE, IT IS CLEAR THAT THE USA COULD BE INVOLVED IN THE ATTACK
- can we set up an html page to update new IP's that attacks originate from? Otherwise, the 'other' side can just publish any IP's here pretending to be us. If we set up a page that is edited by a friendly tech, then we know that the source is ok. As new IP's come in, they can be mailed to a trusted tech for updates.
- Right now it is quiet and we have successfully kept ahead of the game with the Zionist hackers. However, we may experience another attack ... since we are also experiencing physical attacks (i.e. guns, tanks, etc) any help we can get from the international community is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
- arab fucker.
- What you going to do about it? Blow his family up when you trace his identity.
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"That we will make a collective network of all our particular struggles and resistances, an intercontinental network of resistance for humanity. This intercontinental network of resistance, recognizing differences and acknowledging similarities, will strive to find itself in other resistances around the world. This intercontinental network of resistances will be the medium in which distinct resistances may support one another. This intercontinental network of resistance is not an organizing structure; it has no central head or decision maker; it has no central command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist"
[SCENE 3] [VR SIT-IN #1] [JAN 98] >>>>
As manifestations took place around the world in remembrance of the Acteal dead on January 1 and 2nd, the Mexican military with the full support of the PRI government began the next stage of the war against peace. As the West stumbled about in celebration of a new year--the first report reached out across the net and slapped us awake once more with the brutal reality of the neo-liberal agenda. This time Zapatista Networks responded with a new level of electronic civil disobedience beyond the passing of information and emailing presidents. On Sunday the 18th of January 1998 a call for NetStriking for Zapata (from Anonymous Digital Coalition) came in via email with the following instructions:
"In solidarity with the Zapatista movement we welcome all netsurfers with ideals of justice, freedom, solidarity and liberty within their hearts, to a virtual sit-in. On January 29, 1998 from 4:00 p.m. GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) to 5:00 p.m. (in the following five web sites, symbols of Mexican neoliberalism):
Bolsa Mexicana de Valores: http://www.bmv.com.mx
Grupo Financiero Bital: http://www.bital.com.mx
Grupo Financiero Bancomer: http://www.bancomer.com.mx
Banco de Mexico: http://www.banxico.org.mx
Banamex: http://www.banamex.com
Technical instructions: Connect with your browser to the upper mentioned web sites and push the bottom "reload" several times for an hour (with in between an interval of few seconds)."
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The World Wide Web -- invented in 1990 at the CERN research laboratories by Tim Berners-Lee -- functions as a "collaborative fictive space that forces us to question the nature of representation and simulation in the visual, verbal and text-based narratives we construct, encounter by chance, and connect through spontaneous threads and purposeful searches." This complex of relations is not fortuitous or mysterious, but the outcome of a genealogy beginning with electro-mechanisation and industrial forms of communication, beginning with Morse who "introduced a new way to experience information mediated through a technology of code, data and speed."
[SCENE 4] [CENTRUM] [SEPT 00] >>>>
Centrum's location was mere detail, and so need not be disclosed - or even decided - until the last minute. Late at night on the 25th, a local person booked into a hotel room under a false name and paid for it in cash. Two of the team stayed the night; the rest arrived early in the morning of the 26th. During the two hours that the march was assembling, Centrum phoned all the communicators and gave them the numbers at Centrum. These were Czech mobile numbers, got by changing foreign mobiles using Czech SIM cards, so the phones were untraceable to anyone. The whole thing was resting on faith that the mobile phone networks would be functioning. As we were in a capital city, we felt it unlikely that the authorities would jam all the networks. In the end, we were right. As back up, there were digital two-way radios with an urban range of around 1km, and longer range CBs. They were, however, very few and badly distributed, so it's fortunate that they weren't needed. All the communicators' numbers were on a computer that could send a text message simultaneously to every number. Centrum contained eight people and the same number of phones. Four of these were numbers given out, three were retained for outgoing calls (mostly to communicators, Traveller and the pirate FM crew) and one for medical communication. Because we'd be talking to people in very loud places (samba, riot or both), there was an effort to have people who could speak with communicators in their native language. In Centrum were native speakers of English, Czech and Spanish. German would've been good too, but nobody came forward to do it. The team also contained someone with legal knowledge and a trained nurse. There was a large-scale map of the city, and coloured pins to denote the different coloured marches and the police. There were several of the team who had a good knowledge of the city's geography. This was crucial in order to be able to direct people to labyrinthine narrow streets for getaways, or else to know, for example, that what appears on the map as a road with open space at either side is in fact a bridge over a ravine. Cycle couriers phoned in with details of police build-ups, people who were surplus to requirements at a barricade were given a police-free route around to join up with a group who were needing more people for a promising push at police lines, groups on either side of police blockades could co-ordinate their knowledge and efforts. Injured people taken to hospital by police could use Centrum to escape custody and get taken to a safe house for medical treatment. Centrum's mission was always clear; it was not a command post of generals, it was simply an information collection and distribution point. Centrum could not see what was happening, and decisions about what to do on the ground rested entirely with the people on the ground.
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The information revolution is altering the nature of conflict across the spectrum. Of the many reasons for this, we call attention to two in particular. First, the information revolution is favoring and strengthening network forms of organization, often giving them an advantage over hierarchical forms. The rise of networks means that power is migrating to nonstate actors, who are able to organize into sprawling multi-organizational networks (especially all-channel networks, in which every node is connected to every other node) more readily than can traditional, hierarchical, state actors. Nonstate-actor networks are thought to be more flexible and responsive than hierarchies in reacting to outside developments, and to be better than hierarchies at using information to improve decisionmaking. Second, as the information revolution deepens, conflicts will increasingly depend on information and communications matters. More than ever before, conflicts will revolve around "knowledge" and the use of "soft power." Adversaries will emphasize "information operations" and "perception management"-that is, media-oriented measures that aim to attract rather than coerce, and that affect how secure a society, a military, or other actor feels about its knowledge of itself and of its adversaries. Psychological disruption may become as important a goal as physical destruction.
[SCENE 5] [PLAN B ZÜRICH] [DEC 00] >>>>
The yearly meeting had managed to get the Swiss state - a country seeing itself as a model democracy - to outlaw any demonstrations and turn the mountain town into a fortress for the rich and powerful with an unprecedented number of police. The anti-WEF coalition mobilised to get to Davos nevertheless, and despite the nearly impossible conditions about 300 people managed to hold a short rally to be hosed down with water cannons, but long enough to spread unease in a lot of households who saw the images on TV. In the meantime most demonstrators had been stopped in the small town of Landquart which resembled a place under military occupation as well. When it became evident that the way to Davos was blocked, a 'plan B' was followed and people moved back to Zürich, the largest city of the country and its financial and economic centre. Relatively small but aggressive units of police engaged the arriving demonstrators in fighting at the railway station, but the forces of order had neither the strategic concept nor the numerical strength (a large contingent of Zürich riot police was in Davos at the time!) to prevent a full-on riot to rage until late at night. Now even taking into account the fact that the establishment media did relatively unbiased reporting blaming the heavy handedness of the police for much of the violence, all this wouldn't constitute anything out of the ordinary as such, if there hadn't been a team of hackers electronically breaking into the server of the WEF itself as well. When the Hackers sent a CD to the press with a comprehensive collection of the credit card numbers, private mobile phone numbers and many other details of the WEF delegates the conflict reached another level. Needless to say, all these numbers, of people such as Bill Gates, Yasser Arafat, Tony Blair, had to be changed, whole organisations had to cancel their cards, details of meetings became known, in one word: the WEF was wounded, because its secrecy was destroyed and also exposed.
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"As the contemporary elite moves from centralized urban areas to decentralized and deterritorialized cyberspace, Mill's dilemma becomes increasingly aggravated. How can a subject be critically assessed that cannot be located, examined, or even seen.... Elite power, having rid itself of its national and urban bases to wander in absence on the electronic pathways, can no longer be disrupted by strategies predicated upon the contestation of sedentary forces. The architectural monuments of power are hollow and empty, and function now only as bunkers for the complicit and those who acquiesce. . . . Nomadic power must be resisted in cyberspace rather than in physical space. A small but coordinated group of hackers could introduce electronic viruses, worms, and bombs into the data banks, programs, and networks of authority, possibly bringing the destructive force of inertia into the nomadic realm. Prolonged inertia equals the collapse of nomadic authority on a global level. Such a strategy does not require action in numerous geographic areas. . ."
[SCENE 6] [NETWORLD CONNECTIONS] [MAR 03] >>>>
The actual defacement appeared on a free web site service provided by NetWorld Connections. Technically known as a "redirect," the hack caused web browsers that attempted to go to the domain name www.aljazeera.net—as well as the English-language site—to be surreptitiously redirected to the content hosted on NetWorld’s servers. Networld became aware of the attack on the morning of March 27 when it detected a spike in traffic. An email from a security specialist confirmed that visitors to Al-Jazeera were being redirected to NetWorld’s service, according to Ken Bowman, chief executive of the Salt Lake City company. "We pulled down the content immediately," Bowman said, adding that VeriSign, which administers the domain registry, eliminated the redirect later in the morning. "They never even touched [Al-Jazeera’s] site," he said. The attack resulted from the compromising of Al-Jazeera’s account with VeriSign subsidiary Network Solutions. The hacker changed the web site’s nameservers to point to those of MyDomain.com, a free hosting service. In a press statement issued March 27, the company said, "MyDomain has learned from NavLink, the company that hosts the aljazeera.net web site from its data centres in France, that Al-Jazeera’s domain name account at Network Solutions was compromised." The problem was corrected by eliminating the redirect and reinstating the correct addresses for Al-Jazeera’s sites. However, the changes take up to three days to filter throughout the Internet. Al-Jazeera’s sites continue to come under DDOS attacks. The FBI has said it has launched an investigation into the attack, but there is little chance that the perpetrators will be identified. The hackers had chosen their target for the hosting of the faked site well. NetWorld’s Bowman explained that the site had been created using a free hosting service that the company offers. Because the service is free, the company does not keep rigorous watch on the activities of its users. "All the supplied information was fictitious," he said. "It’s a free site, so we don’t track any data. We don’t track the Internet addresses or anything else. It would take a staff of about 500 to do so." Bowman said NetWorld are analysing what happened and may change the way the free portion of the site is administered to prevent future incidents. Far more worrying is the fact that the records of Verisign, one of the leading providers of secure web services, were compromised. VeriSign maintains the Internet registry for the .com, .net, .cc and .tv top-level domains and administers the authoritative database for all domain names registered in those top-level domains after acquiring Network Solutions, the company originally given authority of the domains by the US government when the Internet became a public network. The records from the whois database—the distributed directory that holds information about each domain—indicated early on March 27 that hackers had managed to forge new domain records. Such records typically describe the services that are offered by a particular domain, such as web, mail and file hosting. VeriSign’s records for Al-Jazeera had been replaced by data that pointed to name servers hosted by MyDomain.com. Those name servers in turn referred web requests to the defacement site located at NetWorld. The company boasts on its web site, "VeriSign’s critical infrastructure services deliver an unmatched level of security and reliability to Internet and telecommunications customers around the world. Nearly all of the Fortune 500 companies, governmental bodies and other organisations, hundreds of thousands of small businesses, and hundreds of service providers rely on VeriSign to engage in digital commerce and communications." The site carries no explanation of how Al-Jazeera’s records were forged. Given the hostility of the US government towards Al-Jazeera, it is difficult to see anything coming from the investigation of the FBI. The way in which the attack was carried out indicates that this was no ordinary hack. While most defacements involve hacking into the server that hosts the site and changing the site’s content, this one targeted the domain name itself, ensuring that administrators at NavLink could do nothing to restore the site. To compromise the Verisign servers would take a high degree of specialist knowledge. It is a tradition among established hackers to use a known nickname in order to take credit for a hack. It is hard to believe that those responsible for such a prestigious achievement would not do the same, but security experts familiar with the defacement scene say they have never heard of a group called Freedom Cyber Force Militia—suggesting it may be a cover for some other organisation and/or individuals.
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The Task Force is not ready to advocate major structural changes in the active reserves. However, there is a large reservoir of individual ready reservists (IRR) and individual mobilization augmentees (IMA) who could be formed into virtual units, disconnected from their earlier active duty service but especially suited to the 21st century Information Battlespace. The potential here is to use IRR and IMA personnel in virtual units, which would participate in "distance drilling" -- participating virtually in unit activities, even from home. And, of course, there are standing reserve intelligence units whose mission would require only a modest tweak in order for them to satisfy the PSYOP information needs more directly.
[SCENE 7] [AL-WATAN XXXX] [MAR 02] >>>>
The destruction of a multitude of other independent TV and radio stations is documented in the Palestine Emergency Committee's preliminary report. Among them are Al-Nasr TV, Manar radio station, Al-Watan TV, and, ironically, the Love and Peace FM radio station. In an occupied land where 24-hour curfews cage families in their homes, TV tends to take on a new role. Not only is it the primary source of entertainment to most families, it is also the most important source of information about what is happening outside the front door. Imagine, then, the shock of countless besieged families when their regular broadcasting was interrupted by a stream of vivid pornography over several networks, including the Ramallah-based private station, Al-Watan TV.
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The relevance of information warfare to social movements and political conflicts have been the subject of study of Rand Corporation researchers John J. Arquilla and David F. Ronfeldt. Over the past decade, they have written extensively about an aspect of information warfare they call "netwar," which they define as: "trying to disrupt or damage what a target population knows or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it...It may involve public diplomacy measures, propaganda and psychological campaigns, political and cultural subversion, deception of or interference with local media".
[SCENE 8] [EMBEDDED AT THE FTAA] [NOV 03] >>>>
The police effort to crack down on protesters in Miami was funded through the $87 billion dollar War on Terror package. The money paid for over-time for the DEA, the ATF, Immigration and Customs, Miami Dade Police Department, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service officers, to name a just a few of those brought in to maintain "order." It also financed the state of the art weaponry on display on the streets of Miami, from de rigeur tear gas and rubber bullets to new and exotic toys such as taser guns, mobile water cannons, and electric shields. What became clear in the lead up to the FTAA was that the "Miami Model" – as law enforcement enthusiasts are calling it – has goals that go way beyond merely keeping the peace. The bigger agenda of the Miami policing operation was to control the public perception of mass protest and grassroots movements. Only days after that FTAA protests on Nov. 23, the New York Times broke a story on the FBI's ongoing policy of infiltrating and spying on the anti-war and global justice movements. Miami was the mainstreaming of overt information warfare against non-violent protest. One of Miami Police Chief John Timoney's first acts in controlling the story was to "embed" the media in the police operations. Appearing on camera in their special issue flack jackets and riot helmets, embedded TV correspondents helped reinforce the perception of the protests as a massive threat to public safety. The story was already defined as "protesters versus police," masking the reality that demonstrators included people from all walks of life. The Miami Herald's embedded reporter uncritically regurgitated Timoney's description of protesters as "punks," "trouble makers" and "knuckleheads," and the chief's vow to "hunt them like a hawk picking mice off a field." It also seemed to be more than coincidence that there were a rash of armed robberies against independent videographers in Miami. At least five independent journalists reported their cameras and footage taken from them at gun and knife point. Brandon Jourdan, of the New York IMC described his experience as follows: "After shooting over 90 minutes of unprovoked police violence against demonstrators, I went to take my footage to a safe location. On the way, I was robbed by two clean cut men who were carrying stun guns. Eyewitnesses from the local community reported they had never seen these individuals before and that they were observed leaving the neighborhood with my camera."
[SCENE 9] [UNENCRYPTED OVER SYRIA] [NOV 03] >>>>
For two days this week, Israel's communications satellite accidentally beamed a live feed from the control room of a highly classified test missile firing, meaning that they could be viewed by anyone in the Middle East with the simplest satellite dish. Four of Israel's most senior generals and their foreign guests were shown in the control room discussing the relative merits of weapons systems and who they might be used against. Officials were seen punching in launch codes, and the latest missile control equipment and maps were on display to anyone viewing. At one point, believing they were in a secure area, Israeli officials were heard discussing access codes to defence industry computers. The broadcast went out when someone - as yet none of the agencies involved wants to accept responsibility - failed to encrypt the live feed that is sent from one testing control room to another via the satellite.
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Every technological system contains its specific form of accident.
[SCENE 10] [BRINGING THE EMBEDS HOME] [APR 04] >>>>
Already, Jim Wilkinson, director of strategic communications at US Central Command in Doha, Qatar (the operation that gave the world the Jessica Lynch rescue), has moved to New York to head up media operations for the Republican National Convention. "We're looking at embedding reporters," he told the New York Observer of his plans to use some of the Iraq tricks during the convention. "We're looking at new and interesting camera angles."
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Goff describes how armies of resistance around the world will increasingly become more brazen in their confrontations with the U.S. military and its surrogates. "The liberation fighters of the future will learn to make allies of chaos and their enemy's ignorance, which feed each other," Goff writes.
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[SOURCES / CONCEPTS]
Pure War / Strategy of Deception / Open Sky - Paul Virilio
Various essays available at c-theory.net / Various essays from rdom@thing.net
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines - Manuel De Landa / Critical Arts Ensemble / www.n5m.org
Rand Corporation publications by John J. Arquilla and David F. Ronfeldt /
Various News / Critical Theory / Military Research / Activist websites
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