Black Blog Ops

Hugh Hewitt writes about "Black Blog Ops" in this week's Weekly Standard Online. He theorizes that someone will engage in skullduggery by using blogs,

True enough. Like a reverse Atlantis, a new archipelago of opinion and news providers has risen up from nowhere to drive stories and news cycles. So we should be asking about the potential for deception in the format. The web is widely used and relied upon. It would not be hard for intelligence services from around the world to build blogs with an intent to deceive or manipulate, putting out solid content to gain an initial audience before using it to disseminate disinformation intentionally.

Hugh conjures up characters from *John LeCarre' novels to dramatize the potential for foreign governments, hostile movements and just plain nefarious individuals. I suppose he could be right. The Drudge Report didn't get to be huge by re-circulating someone else's stale news. Similarly, big-time bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds (those guys don't need any more links) have managed to get on top of the wave and ride it to fame by simply pointing out hot links to blogs and fresh tidbits of news.

Hewitt raises some interesting questions but I'm not going to start building a bomb shelter in the backyard just yet. What he doesn't factor into the equation is the "signal to noise ratio". There are just so many crappy blogs out there that the effectiveness of 99.9% of them for doing the kinds of things he's worried about is nil. In fact, that's the great thing about blogs.

The People's Republic of China could start some blog with plenty of misinformation but just as easily you could get 10 other blogs from Taiwan spewing out the opposite misinformation. There's some potential for the huge blogs to engage in mischief, but for the rest of us, well, we should be so lucky. Unless Hugh decides to use his blog Hughhewitt.com in an attempt to destabilize France, I think we can sleep soundly.

*I've read a few John LeCarre' novels and I've decided he's the liberal's Tom Clancy. His characters do too much hand-wringing for my taste and in his later novels LeCarre's pacifist views seem to get more prominent. If you want to read a real cold war spy thriller get one of Len Deighton's books.

**I think half the reason why I wanted to blog on this topic is the title of Hewitt's article. "Black Blog Ops" sounds pretty cool for some reason.