Uncle Sam’s Spam Propaganda

Baghdad blocked all emails from the USA
Whatever you may say, but the Internet has radically changed the world. The truly unlimited resources (which are not yet thoroughly studied, by the way) of the worldwide web are joyful and scaring at the same time. Resourceful Americans started using the Internet as an instrument of propaganda. In the present day conditions, can you imagine what antediluvian methods of propaganda were used in the old days? The best methods were leaflets and humanitarian aid scattered from planes. The situation with spreading propaganda materials is quite different today: a man is sitting quietly in a warm office and emails messages all over the world.

Recently Iraq, so much disliked by the USA has fallen victim of this spam-propaganda. The Pentagon emailed messages in Arab addressed to military commanders and representatives of the civil administrations in Iraq with a view to set them against Saddam Hussein. The emails also urge the Iraqi people to report about the sites with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and to disobey orders of the Iraqi president. The emails were received from the USA within several days until Baghdad blocked them. Now just several high-ranking governmental officials, officers and scholars have the access to the state-controlled email.

Saddam Hussein himself fell victim of this spam propaganda. PRAVDA.Ru already reported that New Hampshire hacker, Brian McWilliams cracked an email of the Iraqi leader. It contained over one thousand emails received within the period of mid-June to mid-August last year, then the email was full. McWilliams says that none of the emails was read and no reply was given to any of them either. Nobody checked the email for a very long period already. When McWilliams did it, he described his experience in October’s issue of Wired News online; the International Herald Tribune also reported about the hacker. It is strange, but McWilliams got no telephone calls from America’s “competent authorities”. The journalists supposed that either the problem was of no interest for them, or it was no secret at all.

Dmitry Chirkin PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Maria Gousseva

Read the original in Russian: https://www.pravda.ru/accidents/34411-irac/

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