Amongst other things that this report describes, one particularly disturbing capability available to jihadi and other terrorist organizations is the ability afforded by digital technology to alter or completely fabricate digital images or audio recordings; a potent instrument at the strategic level, and one that allows terrorist/insurgent groups to go toe-to-toe with state governments in the media war, often the decisive theater in Western countries at least. Terrorist/insurgent groups, as we have seen for the last few years, have been able to negate politically much of what they have failed to accomplish militarily (albeit often in tandem with media outlets that have their own axes to grind; fellow travellers in some respects, so to speak).

Although such digital technology to allow for altered or fabricated imagery and recordings has been availble since the 1980's, and the possibilities of that pondered over the last 20 years, I don't think that Governments and Publics that are the intended targets of jihadi information operations are really prepared for the day when the airwaves and the net are dominated by news, imagery, and sound-bites of some incident in some sensitive place or on some sensitive issue that is either heavily altered by jihadis wielding digital techonology to do so, or outright fabrications of things that do not exist or never actually occurred. Disturbing.