A Well-Designed Disinformation Campaign

For just about a thousand dollars, you could interact in chat rooms and web and news-based forums to link back to phony but authentic news sites such as "Middle East Times" to promote your own agenda. (The thousand dollars handles the dozens of sites and the GB bandwidth utilization costs.)

Think about the disinformation campaigns that started in 1999 and continue to today, professing the potential fallacy of the 2:1 ratio of programmer power in non-USA countries. Dumb USA CIOs everywhere have been sucked into this vortex from these foreign disinformation campaigns that claim the power of 2 foreign programmers for the cost and output of 1 USA programmer. In some cases it's true, in many other cases it is not.

Why not fight fire with fire by creating your own disinformation campaign with phony, almost realistic news sites, that sort of carry almost realistic-sounding news, weather, and sports information, but then slip in your own phony articles that claim that India, for instance, has become less productive in the IT marketplace compared to the USA, or that salaries are going up there -- anything to make USA programmers look great and Indian programmers look less attractive to the dumb CIO.

And what's with the dumb CIOs in the USA making these decisions, sucking up all this foreign disinformation? Every CIO I ever met got out of business grad school, stays away from computers when he gets home, golfs on Fridays instead of going to work, never wrote a stitch of code in the real world besides an Excel macro, and vainly and inaccurately spoke in acronym jargon (old concept rehashed as new concept) picked up from a mix of Gartner and IDC monthly reports and Business Week magazine. If you could fool the folks at Gartner, IDC, and Business Week with your phony but realistic-looking news site and its site affiliates, you could change the course of history.

And what? I'm unethical? Okay, then prove to yourself that most foreign businesses and governments outside the USA aren't using the Internet as a tool for disinformation campaigns that promote their trade status. They are!