Enemy propaganda in cyberspace? Don’t tell Karen Hughes

Two timely posts from Noah. First is yesterday’s post on insurgent/terrorist blogs:  

Islamists use the Web to spread propaganda, communicate anonymously, share training guides, get organized — even sell t-shirts.  So it’s not exactly a shock that Muslim extremists are blogging, too.

It’s nice to see on of the blogs use a Radio Free Europe broadcast to let his readers know when Islam went to the Czech Republic. It’s not nice to see a comment on a blog that says

I know the society from which these US soldiers come. If they’re raping the women, best believe that some US soldiers are raping Iraqi males, too, even little boys. The societies need to know these things to advise their men to never let anyone take them into custody alive. Male or female, they’re likely to be raped by male soldiers.

You probably already know that Karen Hughes has essentially abrogated her responsibility to counter malicious propaganda in cyberspace. If you don’t then look at her Cold War-era public diplomacy strategy, keep in mind she has “four or five” bloggers working for her and her “identifying misinformation” website is only funded for a single individual (at least the last time I spoke with TL who is the man behind it). And no knock to TL, but “identifying misinformation” isn’t the same as countering it or even getting ahead of the ball.

Now perhaps USC’s Center for Public Diplomacy wants to counter this hate speech from within their virtual world, the after all just received over a half-million dollar grant to do so. Apparently the Center for Public Diplomacy sees this as part of their mission since they’ve been working on their Virtual Worlds project for some time. More on that in a follow up post.

And Noah’s other timely post? Also in a follow up.