>>Western world wide open for study and manipulation
I have long since held the opinion that blogs and online publishing would yield an avenue for foreign influence and cognitive attacks on our way of life.
For what it is worth, I do believe that the government and our intelligence agencies are fundamentally good and are staffed by mostly non-partisan, non-extremist patriots who I have tremendous respect for. We are, presently, a government for the people by the people and of the people.
I do, however, fear that our intelligence agencies and politicians exist with a high degree of arrogance derived from a faith in the superiority of our messaging. I share their faith that our way of life and methods of dealing with each other is superior to that of communist or authoritarian societies, but I do not share their same level of arrogance.
I am more inclined to think that the internet should be modified so as to ensure that the emergent dialogue, the emergent narrative of history and events, is one that came about naturally from our citizens speaking with one another.
For starters, comment sections should be siloed or firewalled nationally. Media entities of significance that wish to portray themselves as reputable news media should be required to have a registration with the government. Their comment sections should be limited to an anonymized walled-garden of citizens of our country only.
Removing foreign influence operatives from the comment sections of CNN, WashingtonPost, and Fox News would do a lot to heal the national divide and quell the brewing extremism.
I would go much further than that and would do tons of experiments if I was in charge of a department handling such a push at the government level. I think all of these troll attacks on our republic fall under the umbrella term "cognitive attacks" and I think it is time we make an effort to apply network security concepts to our national, internal dialogue.