24 December 2000. Original Spanish (below) translated by Cryptome with Systran.

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To: dromology@lists.village.virginia.edu
From: Luther Blissett
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2000 17:50:30 -0600
Subject: DROMO: INFORMACIÓN Y VIGILANCIA


INFORMATION SYSTEMS and SURVEILLANCE
New technologies of communication and social control
Francisco Sierra

Professor of Information theory, Department of Journalism, University of Seville. Author, among other publications, of "Elements of Information theory" (Airborne Magnetic Detection, Seville, 1999) and "Communication and Insurgency. The information and the propaganda in the war of Chiapas" (Hiru Argitaletxe, Gipuzkoa, 1997). At the present time, he teaches in the Program Hispalense de Doctorado in Journalism the seminar "Information and Military Propaganda" (1998-2000).

The miniaturization of electronic equipment and the advances in the production of armaments and computer science equipment, thanks to technological advances of knowledge and Information Systems (IS) have led some theoreticians to define war of the information era as digital war. The techno-comunicative factor is today a permanent benchmark as much as the increasing necessities of mobility and rapid performance of air and ground forces. And, like management of data of strategy and intervention, the ramification of decentralized contingency forces, the effective coordination of different components of the military and, of course, the control of IS and decisionmaking, requires concentrating under military control political, diplomatic and civil actions through diverse forms of control of public opinion and manipulation of the real-time information.

For military doctrine and strategy, the digital notion of military action includes and understands the global reelaboration of the doctrine and the programs of investigation and development of the army, in the attainment of the objectives and the application of technological means of organization and military performance of 21st Century force. The conception of cybernetics, logistic and the armament engineering based on the computation, online IS and artificial intelligence participate in theory and military practice directed and integrated by a model of analysis of the globalization of force and combat operations for the 21st Century. Political doctrine is also assimilated into the doctrine of international security which brings into question the concept of sovereignty, regional limits and borders, the limits between the war and peace, or the front and the rear of the battlefield, and orients the action of the new strategic thought of the Pentagon:

". . . the concept of military is expanding, as a minimum, towards two-way traffic. In the first place, no longer we can simply see war as if armies of nations or group of nations are fighting each other (...) the second way in which the military concept is being extended relates to the conventional battle."(1)
The notion of "progressive development" clarifies and synthesizes this qualitative conception more than gradual scaling of the warlike in our time, legitimized in the average ones like new ideology in the warlike conscience of international the public opinion. One perceives, in short, a significant change of a strategy from unfolding (distributed conception of the war) to a projective vision of the armies and the military tactics, being logically the information (the communicational space of means and technologies) the main instrument of intervention, and war a strategy of victory by persuasion, that is to say, an information war, a media and propaganda war, that, from the conflict of the Persian Gulf, comes legitimizing to the performance from a speech and a governed informative policy, as it is possible to be observed in American official documents, by the absolute principle of the public security.

In the new forms of war, based intensively on the sources and computer science resources, victory comes in the capacity of destruction and domination of the IS. The new technologies constitute an integrated contribution to the military sphere in the diverse institutions of public security, assumed by principle the deliberate confusion between warlike strategies of tele-surveillance and operations. Thus, for example, space is defined, in the American doctrine, as a strategic area of national interest in the communicative conception of the military, overlapping in the responsibility of the control of the satellite networks to the private sector.(2) The policy to use radio-electromagnetic space and the technologies of telecommunications in the service of national security are not new. They constitute, in fact, historically one of the central axes of expansion of the international power of the United States in the world, by means of the coordination of the military tele-technological networks with the civil and commercial sector (Teledesic, Global Star, Orbicom) based on intelligence activities.

Today, nevertheless, unlike the classic doctrine of national security, the extension of the philosophy of the total and permanent war estimates the accomplishment until its last consequences of a media culture of global video-surveillance, in which security is consecrated as the principle director of public life, in new discipline of regulation and social preparation of the civic conscience to the order necessities and military-political control for preventive reasons.(3)

Pedagogy for military information warriors consists indeed of the calculated and ambiguous extension of the warlike logic to civil and political life. National -- and supranational -- security policy, extends today to all the forms of electronic communication.(4) From construction of systems of artificial intelligence, espionage, tracking and satellite teledetection have come reinforcement of the traditional intelligence systems of the State and a strict control of electronic communications. Today, the FBI has extended to the Internet and mobile telephone systems its policy of supervision and control, and further responds to the challenge of new means and technologies of the communication, thereby reformulating the bases of military-political thought on public security, until its own information culture and its own doctrine of right of access to information that today circulates between professionals and citizens. From an aggressive policy of intervention in the scope of programs like INFOSEC OUTREACH, created for the design and evaluation of the information MISSI, or security systems, such as NETWORK SECURITY INITIATIVE, to development and coordination of modular networks of security for information networks for the defense of the National Information Infrastructure (NII), are some of the sectorial projects that the National Security Agency has started in the United States for planning digital war -- under the supervision of the Secretary of Defense for the Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, an official of the Department of Defense -- implementing a panoptical model of surveillance and information control. In agreement with Virilio:

"From the moment at which the market is only world-wide in real time and that the real space of economic geopolitics decreases by day in day, the optical overview becomes indispensable for global commerce with a commencement of competition among the diverse visual and audio-visual sources of information."(5)
The media methodology of tele-surveillance thus institutes, symbolically and practically, a complex apparatus of despersonalization, automatic, invisible control and totalization in which the subject is reduced to an appendix to be filed by means of the State's visibility and transparency. Omnivision, as Virilio points out, creates a system of domestic monitoring under the observation of global optics, whose mercantilization of the gaze transforms space-time and experience of the spectator public from interactive models of representation to world-wide tele-surveillance:

"To see what is taking place at the present moment (tele-present) in the world, there is a market here, a market of the gaze whose panoptical character of domestic monitoring escapes attention by hiding behind broadcast scenes televised for the large public, as we have known for more than half century. Until the transitory character of the broadcast program and its reception network are seen to favor the indelible possibility of a permanent archive of the direct broadcast that revolutionizes the law of reception to one fixed hour of a message of information, as the CNN did twenty years ago, with its known success."(6)
The banalization of war, the terrífying redundancy of the machines of death spread by the media-commercial system establishes in this way the bases of a new system of domination, under the military logic that combines and determines the assembly of social activities in coherence with the culture of consumption. Thus, technological sophistication and the pregnancy of a rhetoric of spectacularized military scene-fabrication, characteristic of imperial systems, cloaks economic, informational and warlike speeches today about the global village in the seductive mantle of the war of the galaxies.

If the war and peace are not today distinguishable or opposed situations, but components of a same process on scale of management of a world order precarious and watched by new international conflicts, the turbulences and global disorders of a "geopolitics of the chaos" would legitimize as necessary a permanent total military strategy in which the application of the force is suitably related to the political results wished, and with these two combined, lead to means and techniques of disinformation and propaganda being indispensable military supports.

From the traumatic experience of the failed military intervention in Vietnam, the High Command of the Pentagon has emphasized the political character of all combat operation to favor an approach centered on the fundamental causes of conflict beyond the military dimensions. In fact, from the expanded conception of military action comes, basically, the counter-insurgency warlike experience. The knowledge acquired in this type of special operations has fostered in the last decades a fundamental political role in the American doctrine of international security. The irregular forms of unpredictable military participants and the increased role played by covert operations have even turned the strategy of low intensity war into a basic doctrine of the present policy of the Pentagon,(7) which ranges from echelons of dissuasion and direct aggression, pacification policies and strategies, to massive war operations such as the bombing of Yugoslavia, to a new correlation and balance between military action and political negotiation that already in the Fifties the American theoreticians of communication called "new public diplomacy."

NOTES

1. Gordon R. Sullivan and James M. Dubik, "How War in This Era Will Get Rid of Information," in Military Review, March-June, 1995, p.35.

2. Cfr. "Space an Area of Vital National Interest," MLCOM 97, Hyatt Regency Hotel, Monterrey, CA, 3 of November of 1997.

3. For an example of this new philosophy of the international security, cfr. Boutros-Ghali, For An Agenda Peace: Preventive Diplomacy. Peacemaking and Peacekeeping, Report of the Secretary General, the UN, New York, 1992; Donald M. Snow, Peacekeeping. Peacemaking and Peace-Enforcement: The U.S. Role in the New International Order, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, 1993.

4. In Europe, for example, Enfopol establishes the interception of the telecommunications by virtue of its monitoring policies for control and prevention of threats that the public authorities identify between destabilizing groups, subversive or simply dissident. Echelon constitutes, in this sense, the precedent of creation of a new global state of planetary monitoring under control of the American military intelligence services.

5. Paul Virilio, "the televisual proliferation," in Le Monde Diplomatique, March, 1998, p.23 to Him.

6. Ibíd., p.23.

7. - Cfr. "Manual of Military Operations in the Conflict of Low Intensity," Manual of Campaign of Army FM 100-20.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BROWN, Fredric J. : The U.S. Army in transition II, Brassey´s Inc. , New York, 1993.

CRAIG, Gordon A. and GEORGE, Alexander L. : Force and Statecraft : Diplomatic Problems of Our Time, Oxford University Press, New York, 1990.

KEEGAN, John : A History if Warfare, Afred A. Knopf, New York, 1993.

LUTTWAK, Edward N. : Strategy. The Logic of War and Peace, Masschussets Balknap, Cambridge, 1987.

O´NEILL, Bard : Insurgency and Terrorism. Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare, Brassay´s, Washington D.C., 1990.

ROMM, Joseph J. : Defining National Security : The Nonmilitary Aspects, Council on Foreign Relations Press, New York, 1993.

SCHULZ, Donald E. Y MARCELLA, Gabriel : Reconciling the irreconciliable : The troubled outlook for US Policy Toward Haití, Strategic Studies Institute, Carlisle Barracks (PA), 1994.

SIERRA, Francisco (Coord.) : Comunicación e Insurgencia. La información y la propaganda en la guerra de Chiapas, Iru, Gipuzkoa, 1997.

SULLIVAN, Gordon y DUBIK, James : Land Warfare in the 21st Century, Instituto de Estudios Estratégicos, Carlisle Barracks (PA), 1993.

VAN CREVELD, Martin : Command in War, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1985.

VAN CREVELD, Martin : The transformation of War, The Free Press, New York, 1991

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