Trump's 'Cyber' Policy Against ISIS Is... 'Hey Look At This New Poll!'

from the well,-that's-something dept

Trump on his plan to fight ISIS: "And now the cyber is so big" - pivots to positive CNN poll. pic.twitter.com/L9nbFCPqaU — Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) September 6, 2016

Michael Flynn: And to stay on ISIS a little bit because this is a really -- I think this is an important topic - it's one of the national security threats that our country faces today. You have described at times different components of a strategy. Military, cyber, financial and ideological. Can you just expand on those four a little bit?



Donald Trump: Well, that's it. And you know cyber is becoming so big today. It's becoming something that a number of years ago, short number of years ago, wasn't even a word. And now the cyber is so big. And you know you look at what they're doing with the Internet, how they're taking and recruiting people through the Internet. And part of it is the psychology because so many people think they're winning. Any you know, there's a whole big thing. Even today's psychology — where CNN came out with a big poll. Their big poll came out today that Trump is winning. It's good psychology, you know. It's good psychology. I know that for a fact because people they didn't call me yesterday, they're calling me today. So that's the way life works, right?



But I think we're doing very well and I really thank the state of Virginia, so many different places have been so incredible. So I thank you very much. But cyber has been very, very important and it's becoming more and more important as you look and a lot of it does have to do with ideology and psychology and lots of other things. You know, we're in a different world today than we were in 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And one of the biggest problems and one of the reasons that we have to knock them out is because the weaponry is so powerful today. You know, in the old days, you could've said, "Well look they have rifles.



We have rifles. We shoot and they have uniforms. We have uniforms." This is a whole different war. The weaponry is so powerful. And we have to beat them over there. We're allowing people to come over here. We're allowing, think of it. Your military people -- we're allowing people to come over here. And you know, I used to watch the migration, and I'd see people with cell phones, I said, "where did they get cell phones?" And some of those people had very horrible things on their cell phones including the ISIS flag. And you say, what are we doing? What are we doing? But we're allowing people to come here and we don't know. Do they turn on us? Are a small percentage of them bad? Because if a small percentage is bad, that's not acceptable. That's not acceptable. We can't take the risk. Just a small percentage can do such damage. So we can't take the risk. So, General, the bottom line is we have to get very tough and we have to get very smart or we're not gonna have much of a country left. I can tell you that right now.

“On Twitter, Isis' preferred social platform, American white nationalist movements have seen their followers grow by more than 600 per cent since 2012,” the study, authored by JM Berger, stated. “Today, they outperform Isis in nearly every social metric, from follower counts to tweets per day.”



[....]



Donald Trump is a prominent subject among white nationalists on Twitter. According to the study, white nationalist users are “heavily invested” in the Republican’s candidacy. Tweets mentioned Mr Trump more than other popular topics among the groups.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

While Hillary Clinton's tech policy proposals seem to be the standard mix of empty promises and vague nothingness designed to not pin her down on anything really serious, Donald Trump's tech policy proposals have basically been incomprehensible nonsense Trump apparently feels that this kind of incomprehensible nonsense is working for him, so he doubled down this week. As first noted by CNN reporter Sopan Deb, Trump responded to a question from (Trump supporter) General Michael Flynn about ISIS and cybersecurity with a word salad of complete nonsense If you can't read that here's the key part:So, uh, wait. What? Apparently Donald Trump's "cybersecurity" policy is "Hey, look at this poll that says I'm winning!" And also "How did ISIS get cell phones?" Meanwhile, the brave Philip Bump over at the Washington Post tried to fact check the only clear factual statement in that rambling mess: that the word "cyber" was just created a few years ago. Of course, that's not true (though I guess that depends on what you consider to be a "short number of years ago"), but I'd argue that the fact that "cyber" predates the birth of one Donald Trump, that the statement isn't all that accurate.But, really, who gives a fuck concerning when Donald Trump thinks the word "cyber" was first coined? The real question should be on what's the actual policy here, because in those three paragraphs above there's nothing even remotely resembling a policy, or a coherent idea. Clinton's tech policy is a hot mess of emptiness, but at least there's a policy that people can look at and talk about. Trump, on the other hand doesn't even seem to recognize what cybersecurity means and what a policy would entail.Oh, and as for the claims about how ISIS is "recruiting people through the internet" multiple studies on that have suggested that ISIS's internet recruitment strategy isn't all that effective -- that most recruiting is done through real world networks, rather than virtual ones. But you know which groups really are having success growing their online presence? White nationalists and neo Nazis , with many of them strongly supporting... Donald Trump.So, yeah. I wonder what Donald Trump's "cyber policy" to deal with those folks would be.

Filed Under: cybersecurity, donald trump, isis, national security, policy