Feral Jundi

    As you guys know, I am always looking into the future of warfare, and the possible uses of today’s technologies.  No rock is left unturned here, and I love coming back to this stuff.  The theme of this post is that in order to apply these new Web 2.0 tools to warfare and business, we must study how others did it and build a snowmobile out of it.

   Now on to the meat of what I am getting at.  If you are a PMC, or even trying to start a grass roots cyber tribe revolution, then you need to study what Niv Calderon and his gang did during the last Israeli war in Gaza.  They were on the cutting edge of mixing Web 2.0 and their war effort, and the outcomes of that effort should be studied by all who are interested.  I know I am, and articles in the past on FJ, in regards to Web 2.0 and warfare, have been influence by these types of uses.

   Last week I made a comment on Steven Pressfield’s blog about the concept of starting a cyber tribe, to support the various tribes in the war that he thought would be helpful in winning the war in Afghanistan.  I discussed the concept of starting a social networking site that had the similar framework as President Obama’s social networking site, or even American Sniper’s website. The idea is to have sites that tap into the legions of supporters, possible supporters, and diaspora throughout the world, all with the goal of cheering on and supplying a tribe on the ground with what it needs to defeat a shared enemy.

   I would say that this ‘cyber tribe’ concept, is a way for chieftains to expand their immediate tribes, and really call on all of the supporters throughout the world for help and for supplies. It is a way to get the middle man out of the way (aid groups and government), and connect the supporters with the tribe directly.  The cyber tribes would have little donation buttons on the site, give calls of action, allow for personal pages, foster a community, set up encrypted email, and post Youtube videos of ambushing and killing the Taliban, all with the idea of bringing the cyber tribe together with the local tribe on the ground.

   Most of all, if the cyber tribe was able to make some money for the cause (google adsense, ad sales, e-books, donations), then the real tribe could conceivably ask for volunteers and pay them at cost for their services– and all through a cyber tribe system.  Call it a Cyber Tribe Co-op.  lol

    Hell, make it a non-profit so people can donate to the cause and benefit in their taxes (in the US at least). Or not, and this would be the choice of the tribe to decide upon.  I say non-profit, because if NGO’s can call themselves a non-profit, a cyber tribe can call themselves a non-profit too, just as long as the aid given by the cyber tribes is not a profit game, but purely a supply and demand game. (Jake had an awesome post about the non-profit PSC, for further exploration)

   With a Cyber Tribe Co-op, the chieftain could put out to the two tribes (cyber and local) what would be a good use of the money earned on the site? (Just an idea)  With a well structured social networking site and a truly democratic bunch of supporters, the crowd will decide how much they want to give to something like that, or how much they want to throw down for a contracted specialist.

    They could even put it out there for true volunteers.  You know, guys that actually want to go up in the hills and fight with their tribal brothers for free, all because they believe in the cause of their tribe.  I know Soldier of Fortune is filled with stories of guys going out to volunteer their time in war zones, all for the sake of assisting underfunded and undertrained groups.  That and to do a story about it afterwards, so they have material for the magazine.  I even remember SoF sending guys out to assist the Mujahideen during the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan, and there were tons of these types of stories. Cyber tribe reporters could be doing the same thing as SoF did, but for adding content to the cyber tribe’s website, thus increasing the SEO of the site, and then getting more traffic because of it!

   So that is all I have on this one, and I look forward to any replies on this.  I also suggest starting a cyber tribe if you think you can do it, and put some action to an idea out there.  There is no rule that you can only have one cyber tribe per local tribe.  You could have thousands of cyber tribes supporting one tribe.  Or maybe Steven will put something together, because I know he is really stoked on anything to do with tribes.  –Matt

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Social media warriors at work in the war room for pro-Israel “Stand With Us”

How Social Media War Was Waged in Gaza-Israel Conflict

by Jaron Gilinsky

February 13, 2009

Both sides deployed dangerous new media weapons during this latest round of fighting in Gaza. Armed with Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts, and Lavazza espresso, warriors fearlessly and tirelessly scoured the cyber battlefield searching for enemy (blog) outposts. Outfitted with high-tech ammunition like HD videocameras, firewire 800s, and white phosphorescent keyboards, they attacked one-sided videos, slanted essays, and enemy propaganda with propaganda of their own. Instead of grad rockets, they launched grad school wits. Instead of anti-tank missiles, they battled with anti-spamming technology. In 22 days of combat in Gaza, these were the young fighters tasked with winning the merciless war of public opinion for their side.

Help Us Win

Niv Calderon, 29, commanded an Israeli social media war room. The day before the war broke out, he was worried about his high-tech start up and moving apartments. But once bombs began falling, he dropped his daily activities and connected himself with Stand With Us, a U.S.-based Israel advocacy group. They hired him to organize an ad-hoc social media “command center” to promote a pro-Israel viewpoint.

“It wasn’t about the money at all. I would have done it for free. It was all from the heart,” Calderon told me in an interview. Calderon’s first step was to organize a group of about 20 media-savvy internationals who spoke French, German, Dutch, Russian, English and Spanish and were willing to go AWOL from their day jobs for a few weeks. Ahuva Berger, an American immigrant to Israel now working in Israeli startups, regularly reported for duty.

“We are fighting against the mainstream media who prefer to ignore certain bits of information about Israel,” Berger told me in an interview, “and social media is an effective way of providing the right information passively.”

The group called themselves “Help Us Win,” and created a website with the same name, serving as an online database for news with a pro-Israel viewpoint. They worked in an office donated by a local college, the Interdisciplinary Center of Herzliya, which also provided office equipment and Internet access. There they spent countless hours scanning the Internet for what they saw as biased blog posts and erroneous news stories, as well as other opportunities to tell their side of the story.

The group hoped to show the world that Israel was fighting Hamas rather than regular Palestinians. They worked to influence online discussions on YouTube, Facebook, and Al Jazeera, and tried to change the commonly used language of the war — they referred to Hamas as terrorists rather than fighters and to the “War on Hamas” rather than the “War on Gaza.”

Their greatest social media success in the war may have been the creation of the Qassam Counter Facebook tool. Every time a Qassam rocket fell in Israel during the war, the Qassam Counter account would tweet another rocket, automatically changing the Facebook status of anyone who subscribed. The Qassam Counter became infectious. At its peak, 75,000 users from 150 countries had “donated” their Facebook status to the Qassam Counter. Calderon knew it was a success when a woman from Thailand wrote to him asking, “What is a Qassam?”

Israeli Defense Forces on YouTube

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) also plunged into new media during this war. Their drones filmed many of the targeted strikes on Gaza, releasing the video to the general public on a YouTube channel. This channel became an instant hit, with nearly 5 million views in its first week. The most popular videos on the site were the surreal aerial-cam attack videos, which have a detached, robotic feel that provides a stark contrast to the more palpable videos filmed on the Gaza streets.

The site also features the IDF’s lone Arabic spokesmen, Avichai Adraee, who addressed the Arab world by playing Quranic excerpts over IDF footage in an attempt to prove that Hamas violated Islamic Law by fighting out of mosques. The IDF said it had learned many media lessons from the Lebanon War in 2006. The major lesson, according to IDF spokeswoman Major Avital Leibovich, was “transparency.” Leibovich said in an interview that they hoped the YouTube channel would show the world that “Israel is a moral army with nothing to hide.”

But if this is so, why were accredited foreign journalists banned from entering the Gaza Strip during the war? Leibovich declined to comment on this, saying that was a government — not a military — decision. Other sources have reported that this was another strategic lesson from Lebanon, when journalists gave away army positions on live TV and distracted military operations, but also that the move may have had more to do with public relations than military tactics.

[Editor’s Note: As Aram Zucker-Scharff points out in comments, another watershed moment of the war was when the Israeli Foreign Ministry had a press conference on Twitter, and he covered it for the UPI.]

Gaza Strip: The Untold Story

“Israel didn’t let in the foreign journalists because they didn’t want the world to see a massacre,” Gazan blogger Sameh Habeeb told me in an interview. Habeeb, 23, from the eastern suburbs of Gaza City, had just graduated with a B.A. in English Literature at the Islamic University in Gaza when he began writing his blog to show the world what it is like for “Palestinians living under siege.”

Before the war, Habeeb described himself as a humanitarian aid worker, a peace activist, and a part-time photojournalist. But during the war he described himself as a sleep deprived, manic 24-hour reporter for many of the world’s top media outlets: “CNN, CBC, CBS, BBC, Sky News, Brazilian media, Liberacion, Le Monde, the Independent, South African News, Indonesian News, and some more that I can’t remember, I worked for all of them.” With their reporters locked out of Gaza, these foreign agencies were scrambling to find new sources of information, and, upon searching the Internet, Sameh’s blog, Gaza Strip: The Untold Story, came up.

Between doing live stand-ups for Dutch TV for the first time and dodging Israeli tank shells, Habeeb somehow managed to update his blog daily during the war. Each day, he provided daily feeds with statistics that were relied upon by the mainstream media. The grim numbers were trusted by many of the mainstream news outlets. Habeeb operated just like a regular journalist would. His home became a very busy one-man international news bureau. His home phone and cell phone rang off the hook. He monitored several local radio stations which were run either by Hamas, Fatah, or the Popular Front.

He regularly checked in with contacts in human rights organizations. He tapped into an organically fused network of local Palestinian journalists, each one passing on data to the next. At night, when the reporters for Al Jazeera slept, he was their stand-by reporter should anything happen. Once a new incident occurred that involved casualties, he would call one of his contacts in the Shifa Hospital, or the head of the ambulance service, to verify the number of wounded or dead. On several occasions he visited the hospital in person. He remembers on the first day of the war being shocked after seeing “rows of people missing legs, heads, arms, or all three.” He cried on his first day in the hospital, but hasn’t shed a tear since then.

During the war he received numerous threatening emails from extremists. They didn’t identify themselves, but they always wrote the same thing, which can be summarized as: “Stop writing lies or you will pay for it.” Habeeb was not intimidated by these threats nor the IDF drones hovering over his house. He didn’t miss a single day’s post during the war.

Now that it is over, and the international news media is allowed back into Gaza, Habeeb is less busy. Life has gone back to normal in Gaza and Southern Israel, which means a rocket here, a missile there. But Habeeb seems changed by the experience, and may find himself in this role again should another full scale war break out. The likelihood of this happening is very high due to the very fragile and oft-violated ceasefire in place between the two sides.

“I didn’t approach my work as a Palestinian but as an objective journalist,” Habeeb said. “It was most important to me that my information be credible and reliable.” His blog broke through the fog of war and became a powerful news-gathering and distribution tool. Sometimes he got paid for his work, sometimes he didn’t, but Habeeb said he didn’t care.

“I didn’t work for the money, but so the world could see what was going on here on our side. This is what motivated me.” The popularity of his blog soared during the war, attracting hundreds of new visitors a day. Most significantly, a blogger had bypassed efforts to hermetically seal the Gaza Strip from the world.

Al Qassam’s Website

It turns out that Hamas’ military wing also has an official and active Internet presence, the Ezzeddeen Al Qassam Martyrs Brigades Information Office, which links up to a website. The site also offers statistics and numbers from the war, which, of course, do not match up to those of the IDF. The home page features pictures of “martyrs,” links to an English forum, and a poll where one can vote whether Hamas should continue the resistance, pursue a political path, or both.

It’s not clear whether these votes will have any effect on Hamas policy, because my numerous attempts to interview them were declined. Clearly though, the rules of public opinion warfare have changed due to the emergence of new, social media tools.

Jaron Gilinsky is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Jerusalem. As a freelance video correspondent for Time, the New York Times, and Current TV, he has produced and directed scores of documentaries on a range of international topics. Jaron is the founder of Falafel TV, a documentary production company, and regularly posts his videos and articles on his personal blog.

Story here.

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From Niv’s LinkedIn Page

I consult companies and brands about their social web strategy.

During December 2008 and January 2009, During the Israeli Operation in Gaza to stop Qassam and Grad rockets from falling in Israel, I was a part of a big team (constructed some of it myself), we ran a social media war room in IDC Herzliya for the state of Israel.

It has been a great honor for me to be one of the leaders of this operation, for the first time in the history of the web, to take part in a task force which goal was to make ISRAEL be present online, all over the web, to use whatever is available against all who talk and act against Israel.

Go here to contact Niv Calderon on his LinkedIn page.

Go here to visit his website.

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Web 2.0 warfare from Gaza to Iran

2 July 2009, by Tom Griffin

Recent weeks have seen an explosion of interest in Twitter, a social networking application which has been used by thousands of internet users to pass on news, views and rumours about the situation unfolding in Iran in the wake of the disputed presidential election.

The Iranian struggle is not however, the first conflict in which emerging ‘Web 2.0’ social media technologies have played a significant role. Israel’s offensive in Gaza in December 2008 – January 2009 provides an important precedent which shows that, despite its undoubted potential for empowering new forms of bottom-up organisation, the social web is not immune from very traditional propaganda techniques.

Read the rest of the story here.