Cori E. Dauber

“ This does tell us something about the priorities of the terrorist and insurgent groups American forces are fighting. With the exception of the ever escalating offense-defense arms race surrounding the improvised explosive devices,30 there are no reports of weapons being particularly advanced. Rather, they tend to be whatever is at hand, whatever can be found in leftover weapons caches or smuggled into the country, while the equipment used for the creation of propaganda, the cameras, the computers, the software, has continued to advance rapidly. ”

“ On the one hand, there is clear and notable evolution in the technology being used in the generation of propaganda, based on what is being captured in the Iraqi battlespace:
Over time technology has gone bigger and bigger. ”

“ The amount of personal digital equipment carried by the troops has continued to skyrocket because the technology available to average citizens in terms of their own capacity to produce information and communicate with others has changed in ways that are nothing short of revolutionary. ”

“ They view the media differently. The original al-Qaeda are hiding in the mountains, not a technologically very well-equipped place. Iraq is an urban combat zone. Technology is a big part of that. I don’t know how to distinguish the Internet now from the military campaign in general in Iraq.”29 After all, as they point out, until very recently, when the original al-Qaeda leadership wished to release an audio file (much less a video file) , they went to the effort of getting a physical copy of a tape to an Arab satellite television network, an old-school way of doing things. ”

“ Where the technology itself is not the most advanced but is several generations behind, they use it to access cutting edge techniques, and constantly push the envelope in terms of creative applications of what technology allows. For example, the British have complained that insurgents have been using Google Earth to plan their attacks on British compounds in Iraq more precisely. ”

“ American media outlets now depend on the terrorists and insurgents for content, so that by uploading this material to the Internet and making it available to anyone who finds it, these groups ensure that it will find its way onto American television network news shows as well. ”

“ In fact, as far as production values go, the software available on the open market may not be the limiting factor for these groups. An enormous amount of opensource software is available. (open-source software is that which is intentionally made available for free by the original programmer in the hopes that a community of users will develop, in the process assisting the programmer in improving the original program.) ”

“ One company is marketing today a piece of equipment that they are calling “basically a live TV truck in a backpack.”57 Now, with “minimal training, anyone who can operate a computer can use it to broadcast professional-quality live video over the internet or on television.”58 It is clear that neither the manufacturers nor the technology reviewers are considering possible downsides to the way technology opens up broadcast-quality access to almost anyone with any kind of agenda. ”

“ The difference is that they had access to blackberries, a far more advanced platform, and one that permitted them to follow the press coverage as the attack unfolded. This was a return, in a sense, to the capabilities of the Munich Olympic terrorists, using the televisions in the athletes’ rooms to follow the press coverage and therefore keep track of the police. ”

“ So overall their [use of] technology has improved.”35 (It should be noted that there are clearly areas where, as a result of Coalition efforts, the ability of insurgent groups to produce propaganda had become so degraded by 2008, however, that they were reduced to spray painting graffiti on walls and underpasses, a technique that had not been seen for several years.) 36 Labs are decentralized, apparently intentionally (even as media strategies seem to be centralized) , and the labs themselves are never connected to the Internet. ”