Information Warfare -the use of information or information technology during a time of crisis or conflict to achieve or promote specific objectives over a specific adversary or adversaries Jeremy Manning

Politics Modern politics have been changed by the introduction of the internet. TV ads slinging mud at an opponent have been around for several decades, but the Web has formed new arenas for attack. On Wikipedia, one can create or edit any article. A popular thing to do on Wikipedia is to change an article over a candidate, either positively or negatively. This can range from making the article slanted to your cause to false accusations or accolades. Another popular technique is google bombing. Google bombs are an attempt to trick Google’s search algorithm into thinking that a page is popular and related to unrelated search terms through the creation of many links to the target. A famous example of a google bomb is the google search for “miserable failure” would show George Bush’s biography page.

Finding and Hiding Data One country that has been in the news recently for their acts of information warfare is China. China is well-known for its techniques of doing their best to censor the internet of sources uncomplimentary to those in power. Google's reputation has been tarnished in assisting China in creating a google.cn that doesn't show results unwanted by the administration. Google executives have argued that to provide China with no google.cn is worse than providing a censored google.cn. Regardless, those promoting free speech in China have also been using the internet as their own platform for launching information attacks, debating and promoting on forums not yet found by the government. The CIA has combined information warfare techniques and modern technology to increase their effectiveness. One of the main reasons that the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union's collapse is the collapse of their economic base. Besides the local lack of food, partially due to the sale of a good deal of the local produce, another economic disaster to occur to the Russians is the destruction of the oil pipeline in Siberia. The CIA was aware of a spy stealing designs for valves of the sort. Rather than out the spy, they fed him bad software code, causing him to take a design back that was in fact designed to fail after awhile working. The result was a pipeline which failed, exploding. Other techniques used by the CIA have been mechanical animals designed to gather audio/visual data on a subject. One such creature was a dragonfly which could fly and record audio. It had trouble dealing with wind, as the real version of the animal doesn't fight the wind but uses it to drift to the place it wants to go. It was never used in a mission, but future versions could employ advanced AI designed to follow the same pattern as the animal it was based on. Another creature was a mechanical fish, the mission of which is still classified.