earlier this year usa today journalist tom vanden brook and ray locker launched an investigation of the programs. the results were disturbing. spending on i.o. mostly in iraq rose from just $9 million to $580 million per year. nevertheless the usa today reported on february 29th pentagon officials have little proof the programs work and won't make public where the money goes. as far back as 2003 information operations road map found the department cannot currently identify what is spent on io or even on specific core capabilities. the pentagon's top io contractor is run by a brother/sister pair with no military contracting experience and $4 million in liens on their homes for failing to pay federal taxes. that hasn't stopped the company from receiving $145 million in federal contracts since 2009. but perhaps most disturbing is evidence that the usa today journalist who spear headed this investigation was subsequently targeted in a possibly criminal disinformation and reputation attack campaign. that campaign appears to have employed tactics including the creation of fake twitter and fak

had been a smear campaign launched against two journalists at usa today their reporters were tom vanden brook and ray locker and they just happened to be working on a report about incredibly costly propaganda campaigns carried out by contractors in iraq and afghanistan and one of these contractors in question leoni industry as well despite the fact that they at least four million dollars in taxes they still got that contract from the d.o.t. anyway what happened in this smear campaign was that there were a bunch of fake web sites that popped up fake social media accounts of wikipedia page and all these were the reputations of these two journalists were attacked on these fake sites and these accounts they're also message boards out there criticizing there are reports there was even content published in their names things like articles that they had written in the past that suddenly contained inaccurate information and at first there were even suspicions that maybe the pentagon was behind this whole thing the whole story is really quite the scandal and yet when it first came out the mainstream m