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PR, Social Media and Govt 2.0

Is Osama bin Laden the New Paris Hilton?

Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has called for banning al Qaeda from the Internet. Or at least from YouTube. (Isn’t that the same thing?) It’s an endearing, “bless his heart” kind of moment. We all support the senator’s noble effort to fight al Qaeda … even as most of us are amazed at his lack of understanding of how the Internet works. Perhaps he should call Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and ask him how China’s efforts to ban the Internet have worked out.

The government's flawed Internet counterterrorism strategies

It’s alarming that the Department of Defense, which invented the Internet (along with Al Gore, of course), seems to understand so little about how it is used for propaganda — terrorist or otherwise. Recent congressional hearings on terrorism and the Internet indicate a Cold War-era mentality among federal policymakers. They seem to view terrorist propaganda efforts as a monolithic “organized framework” orchestrated by a few Goebbels-like masterminds within Al Qaeda.