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Comment by airmailspecial | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

  The Canadian Forces had to launch an investigation after a September 2020 incident when military information operations staff forged a letter from the Nova Scotia government warning about wolves on the loose in a particular region of the province. The letter was inadvertently distributed to residents, prompting panicked calls to Nova Scotia officials who were unaware the military was behind the deception. The investigation determined the reservists conducting the operation lacked formal training and policies governing the use of propaganda techniques were not well understood by the soldiers.

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As mentioned:

"The investigation determined the reservists conducting the operation lacked formal training and policies governing the use of propaganda techniques were not well understood by the soldiers."

So that's a one-off versus some sort of ongoing plan and limited in any case due to it not even being an intentional release. This above attempt was from untrained reservists who weren't trained properly in the techniques and was accidental release in nature, not intended.

The following seems to imply more systematic, non-accidental information campaigns:

"Last year, the branch launched a controversial plan that would have allowed military public affairs officers to use propaganda to change attitudes and behaviours of Canadians as well as to collect and analyze information from public social media accounts.

The plan would have seen staff move from traditional government methods of communicating with the public to a more aggressive strategy of using information warfare and influence tactics on Canadians. Included among those tactics was the use of friendly defence analysts and retired generals to push military PR messages and to criticize on social media those who raised questions about military spending and accountability."

It would be nice to have a few examples of this intentional use of propaganda techniques versus the one "accidental release" and innuendo so we can see what is being alleged here as intentional information warfare.

I mean, that's what they would say isn't it? "Oh no, I accidentally had several squads go out and install industrial-grade loudspeakers in the woods and approved the sending out of forged warning letters to actual residents, oopsie doopsie!" and "Ah those guys weren't supposed to do that grr, sorry we'll tell them to stop!". Like yeah, ok, sure. Regardless, it's more than a little scary, not just that they're intentionally targeting the Canadian public, but that the people doing it are this incompetent. Unless they intended to get caught and that was part of the plan, who knows.

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