A case study in how the US government uses the free press in effect as its propaganda department to justify acts of aggression. According to a survey, most Americans believe DPRK hacked Sony. Further, most Americans favor a strong response including more economic sanctions. The author, Glen Greenwald, compares the USG FBI claim that DPRK hacked Sony to two US lies which led to wars which killed millions of lives: Gulf of Tokin Fraud and the Iraq WMD Fraud. The US is a democracy and the President or ruling Party cannot declare and conduct war as they please. However, there is nothing to stop them from fabricating lies or using faulty intelligence to lead the people into wars. With regard to the Sony Hacking, most cyber security experts point to an inside job and not a publicity stunt or DPRK. The insider, they point to, could be a disgruntled former employee or someone who was on target to be terminated, in alliance with perhaps Russian hackers. Now hacking of movies planned for release reportedly is not uncommon. However, a publicity stunt is ruled out in this case because employee salaries, social security numbers, and email correspondence were also dumped. And so far, there are no reports of discrepancies in these data dumps to the real life. There is also likely to be a hefty cost in terms of legal fines related to the private data being dumped, but also difficult to remunerate but likely as real strategic costs in having its top officers emails dumped for their competitors to see. Thus, although the real culprit is yet to be indicted, there seems to be some credence for the inside job/by disgruntled insider theory. The author of the linked article claims that the bulk of the US media becomes a willing accomplice in the US government propaganda efforts, and its not necessarily due to ignorance. The author claims that too many media organizations, including the venerable New York Times, forget common sense journalistic skepticism, especially given past discrepancies by USG anonymous sources. This the author says is either sloppy, ignorant, or intentional on the part of the media. Some do it for profit, becoming loose on facts and too easy on the government and anonymous sources (government access is highly desired by reporters and also highly exploited by the government). But some are likely just jingoistic believers in unbridled US exceptionalism. Either way, they do not do their jobs properly, sometimes mislead people, which sometimes lead to catastrophic wars at the cost of millions of lives and mis-allocation of economic resources. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/01/north-koreasony-story-shows-eager-u-s-media-still-regurgitate-government-claims/
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 19:14:23 +0000