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Gabiam reviews Everybody's War: The Politics of Aid in the Syria Crisis edited by Jehan Bseiso, Michiel Hofman, and Jonathan Whittall.
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We are experiencing the rise of unprecedented opportunities as a result of the digital revolution, but regrettably this has also been accompanied by a number of novel threats. One of the most visible manifestations of these threats is the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation. The implications of this threat extend from the individual to the national and international levels, where misinformation and disinformation bring the risk of hybrid warfare and power competition closer to home. Needless to say, the breadth of these implications makes dealing with digital misinformation even more difficult. This commentary focuses on several global events where misinformation and disinformation were used as a tactical tool, including the 2016 U.S. elections, Brexit, and COVID-19. Then, we discuss the situation involving Türkiye, one of the nations that serves as both a target and a focal point of regional disinformation campaigns. The commentary then shifts to some of the Communication Directorate's most significant initiatives, such as the creation of the Earthquake Disinformation Bulletins, the Law on the Fight Against Disinformation, and the Center for Fight Against Disinformation. Finally, above all, this commentary aims to raise awareness of the dangers of online misinformation and urges international cooperation to ensure that the truth always prevails.
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Since the full-scale Russia-Ukraine war started recently, there is a lack of peer-reviewed scholarly literature directly discussing the war and the use of information warfare. [...]this article presents its findings mainly through content and documentary analysis of official and media publications in Russian, English, and Chinese. Information Warfare The term information warfare, or information war, was developed by Russia and is widely used. Since the early 1990s, Igor Panarin has been leading the discussion of information warfare.2 He considers information warfare a psychological 1 Andrew Anthony, "March in Support of Ukraine in London: Everything Was Turning Blue and Yellow," The Guardian, March 27, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/27/march-in-support-of-ukraine-in-london-everything-was-turning-blue-and-yellow. [...]it actively develops information warfare to gain the capability of influencing public opinions and counteracting Western influence. [...]China emulates Russia by using information campaigns to promote pro-China narratives, such as during the Covid-19 pandemic, to confront the West.11 Meanwhile, the West, especially the United States, has considered Russia and China a threat to the Western-dominated world order. [...]in the eyes of Western scholars or governments, the term information warfare represents the weaponized spread of pro-Russia and pro-China information to gain the Western audience's support.12 Take the United States National Security Strategy as an example.
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In this study, we examine China's cognitive warfare coordinated with military air operations during the COVID pandemic in Taiwan. In May 2021, Taiwan experienced its first novel coronavirus outbreak with up to 500 daily cases. The Chinese government launched a series of coordinated "cognitive warfare” campaigns targeting Taiwan in addition to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) frequent air force incursions into Taiwan's air zone. Meanwhile, through manipulation of the vaccine supply, China turned COVID vaccine into a political issue in Taiwan involving multiple players including pharmaceutical developers, tech giants, and local politicians. Combining multiple sources of data, we analyze the Chinese Government's orchestrated cognitive and information warfare (IW) efforts targeted at influencing the Taiwan public's trust in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government as well as its home-developed vaccine. Identifying the patterns of influencing using cognitive and IW, we found China's ultimate goal was to instill skepticism and confusion in Taiwan's public about the President Tsai Ing-wen's health policy and more generally undermine the creditability of the DPP government.
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[...]unless NIWC Pacifics leadership directed that performance of a specific, approved tasking required that it take place at a particular physical workplace location, the laboratory workforce was directed to telework from a safe location while practicing social distancing. [...]the authors distributed two surveys to a subset of the workforce in the early days of the pandemic to assess the perceived work effectiveness of the organization. While Phase 1 of this study targeted a single project and Phase 2 focused on a single division, the researchers felt that expanding the study to a larger number of projects within a department, including the associated support and leadership roles, would help confirm whether or not distributed operations in the form of maximum telework has been an effective means to support the Warfighters. [...]similar survey questions from the previous phases were posed to the department organization on how productive the workforce is and how successful the projects are while operating under maximum telework. Research typically manifests strong evidence in that a large majority of no options or neutral responses reflect an unwillingness of respondents to provide a thoughtful answer (Hopper, 2016a). [...]the authors considered it an imperative for the survey questions to encourage thoughtful answers gleaned only after an extended period of time, and following a major shift in operations from onsite work to telework.
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Packer and Reeves also collaborated on the forthcoming co-authored book Prison House of the Circuit: Politics of Control from Analog to Digital (Packer, Nuñez de Villavicencio, Monea, Oswald, Maddalena, & Reeves, in press). [...]just two or three weeks ago, the U.N. released a report explaining that it's likely that the first instance of autonomous drones making their own decision to kill soldiers occurred in a skirmish in Libya in March 2020 (United Nations Security Council, 2021). [...]I think there's a general recognition by folks in the military, by journalists writing about this issue, by intellectuals, that there has been a shift in the past half century, 75 years, to a different kind of warfare. In terms of a paradigm, too, I'm also just interested because the American military, post-Vietnam, has described itself as subscribing to the idea of information warfare-using embedded journalists, managing the flows of information surrounding conflicts. Media doot only manipulate soldiers to fight better and citizens to support various military efforts but rather, the scale of warfare has reached a level of complication that without a vast logistical apparatus, war is going to be lost-that logistical terrain of war is going to be lost-and the "logistically dominant" force, nation, (or) group of allies will prevail.
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This chapter is about analyzing cybersecurity risks and their mitigation for work-from-home considering the COVID-19 situation, concerning the tools and techniques being used to run the organization’s operations. This chapter will help you understand the utilizations of online stages as a home office, and it will clear all the issues that emerge during this pandemic circumstance. Everything is discussed in insights concerning the dangers of tools and applications, which has picked up the business's goal shockingly. This is the worst pandemic that ever happened to humanity because every company and department suffers from this tragedy. Moreover, cybercriminals are constantly looking for new attack vectors. Already they have attempted to exploit the servers of many corona research centers. Also, they have strived to take over video conferencing platforms like zoom. Alleviation of those all-outsider applications and their answers are covered in this study work, which will assist you to make your home environment and your home office safe. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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[...]disinformation was adopted as the English translation of дезинформация and the definition adopted for the remainder of this paper is: The prefix mis- originates from the Proto-Indo-European ·mei- meaning 'to change';unusually there was no descendant prefix in Latin (Renfrew 1990;Ringe 2006). [...]it was more likely to have entered Old English as a word forming element from Old Germanic, for example mislæran meaning 'to give bad advice" or 'teach amiss" (Simpson & Weiner 1991). [...]even when the content and purpose of information remains unchanged. social media and information communications technology can serve as a catalyst and an accelerator to propagate its spread (Chaves & Braga 2019). According to Santos-d"Amorim and de Oliveira Miranda (2021), these terms were introduced in news reporting but have become increasingly used to explain the actions undertaken in information warfare campaigns.
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The quality of opposition and penetration possibilities are also altering in the rapidly changing world. In parallel with the technical and technological development, it seems that in pre-war, wartime and postwar proceedings, the informative and psychological components, if are not pushed to the forefront, do not concede to the military actions with their significance of influencing the opponent. The second war of Artsakh, which lasted from September 27 to November 9 in 2020 and the military crimes carried out by the Turk-Azerbaijani tandem during the war, shows that the policy towards Armenians implemented by both Turks and Azerbaijani has not been changed over a century. That is, since 1918, all the tools with the military, informational, and psychological components used by Azerbaijan are initially targeted not only at the azerbaijanization of the territories but also against the statehood of Artsakh and human rights. In this regard, it is imperative for the Armenian side to clearly and objectively convey the available information of inhuman policy against Armenians to the international community.
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The COVID- 19 pandemic has brought many changes to the ways scientific conferences are being run. After an exhausting period, the relaxation of the COVID-19 restrictions finally arrives in 2022, and with it also a maneuvering space for the organizing committees of a conference. It is thanks to the gradual mitigation of the pandemic that the conference in Kosice was able to be organized in a physical format after a long hiatus. In the second half of May 2022, the Department of Political Science of the Faculty of Arts of the Pavol Jozef Safárik University in Kosice held a scientific conference for students and young researchers entitled Truth vs. Post-Truth: "It's not true, but it could be". Moreover, on May 20, 2022, a conference was opened in the Platón building at the UPJS campus. Due to the presentational format of the conference, the audience could ask questions to the panelists in person or via the Sli.do application.
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Over the last 15 years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has conducted an ambitious campaign to increase the efficacy of its external propaganda. Drawing from primary Chinese languages sources, this study identifies and traces the origins of the overarching objectives of these efforts. In addition, it outlines the concrete steps that Beijing has taken to date to strengthen Chinese foreign-directed media. Using translated professional journals, the study also analyzes how Chinese subject matter experts in their own words assess Beijings successes and shortcomings in improving the reach and resonance of Chinas external propaganda. This research was conducted on behalf of the US Indo-Pacific Commands China Strategic Focus Group in support of USINDOPACOM requirements.
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At the global level, rapid technological advances and ambiguities of international norms require the development of new approaches and views for clarifying notions of digital behavior. The digital world does not have boundaries, and there is no global consensus and understanding on legal aspects of digital space. In this regard, Russia, China, and many like-minded countries have different concepts of the applicability of international law to the digital world. These states could potentially operate in the digital space according to different understandings of what is permissible under international norms, including international humanitarian law. A reinterpretation of the international legal framework means providing new explanations of existing norms. As mentioned by Professor Michael Schmitt, the general editor of the two Tallinn Manuals, a secondary source of law cannot create law. States make laws. New realities of the twenty-first century, including the COVID-19 pandemic, will catalyze the definition of rules of global digital cooperation architecture by states in the future.
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The article uses the Sedov-Taylor function to model "information bubbles" formed in the global information space due to information attacks. The authors identify the most relevant determinants that describe information activities related to cyber threats and reactions of economic agents in the global digital economic space. The article hypothesizes about the emergence of "information bubbles" due to increases in information activities and their rupture due to information intrusion, leading to appropriate reactions of economic agents and their subsequent stabilization over time. The empirical data from global web statistics indicates, that four large-scale information overloads were caused by cyberattacks during the study period, which led to the rupture of "information bubbles". Application of autocorrelation functions allows us to determine that the period during which misinformation spreads is, on average, seven days. Solution of the Sedov-Taylor optimization problem and calculations of differential equations, as well as their derivatives, suggest several indicators. Namely, a breakpoint of the second kind, corresponds to the rupture of the "information bubble" with a subsequent adaptation of the system;the inflection point of the function identifies the levels of information activities related to cyber threats, which will change the consequences of the "information bubble" rupture;the minimum possible level of the reactions of economic agents in the global digital economic space.
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The legal implications of information activities in the context of armed conflict against the background of the digital transformation have so far received only scarce attention. This article aims to fill this gap by exposing some of the legal issues arising in relation to mis- and disinformation tactics during armed conflict in order to provide a starting point for further debate in this respect. Specifically, it explores the existence and content of existing limits imposed by international humanitarian law on (digital) information operations and inquires whether the current framework adequately captures the humanitarian protection needs that arise from such conduct.