How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet
How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet Part 1 Part 1: Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth As the digital revolution was underway in the mid-nineties, research departments at the CIA and NSA were developing programs to predict the usefulness of the world wide web as a tool for capturing what they dubbed “birds of a feather” formations. That's when flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in rhythmical patterns. They were particularly interested in how these principles would influence the way that people would eventually move together on the burgeoning internet: Would groups and communities move together in the same way as ‘birds of a feather, so that they could be tracked in an organised way? And if their movements could be indexed and recorded, could they be identified later by their digital fingerprints? To answer these questions, the CIA and NSA established a series of initiatives called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS)