USAT| Reporter, editor targets of cyber campaign

The two USA Today journalists have been investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors, the paper is now reporting, and now have themselves been "subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites."

Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, "along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments,'' writes USAT's Gregory Korte. Websites were also registered in their names.

USAT says the timeline of the activity "tracks the paper's reporting on the military's 'information operations' program, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan — campaigns that have been criticized even within the Pentagon as ineffective and poorly monitored."