Information warfare is a bigger problem than cyber warfare

Kimmo Huosionmaa

The information warfare is one of the major problems in the world. For this kind of warfare is no need for any special equipment. Only blog and writing skills are enough for making successful information operations. Basically, the information warfare is simply delivering false or one-way information about the situations or for some other reasons. One of the most important reason might be that somebody would want to decrease the value of the companies, that this actor could buy this company at a low price and sell it with good profit. This is one version of influence on some company price and the criminal version of the information operation.


Even without any special skills information warfare is dangerous, and that can be used to deliver false information about the political situation in some countries. Or it can be used to destroy the career of politicians, by claiming that they are made crimes like assaults, what are hidden from the public, and the purpose of those operations could be influence the political control.  The thing, what makes information warfare so difficult to defy, and the reason for that is, that every homepage can be claimed as information warfare. The censorship is one version of information warfare because it can filter the information, what is uncomfortable for the people, who control the censorship.


Of course, there are many people, who are talking about flash pictures and other subliminal messages, what is delivering in those films, what is involved in those pages, and those flash pictures are only one frame inside the film, and they can put in movies by using some film editing program. This is why that kind of programs are dangerous in wrong hands. In the real world, that kind of usage can be controlled, and those films, where is the subliminal frames can be removed.


But normal homepages are difficult to delete, and there are many discussions, does the western military or security authorities should have the right to change the information, what is on some fundamentalists homepages. In those cases, the information like bank account numbers could be changed, because security service would want to track the people, who give money to those organizations. Also, the meeting points can be changed, and when some terrorist candidate comes to meet the contacts, would that person arrest immediately.