By Sheldon Greaves

We’ve been hearing for at least a couple of years now about the mass-deception operations aimed at the American people in the last election. It’s not the only time truth and facts have gone by the board as a matter of policy or a business plan; I mean, let’s be honest. This isn’t the first time certain interests have spent billions to persuade Americans of something that isn’t true. We have an entire economic sector–advertising and marketing–whose sole purpose is to persuade people to promote a certain view or impression, and then spend their money accordingly. Fake news is old news.

But this time it’s different. I’ve mentioned elsewhere about how the Russians have dusted off and tweaked their Cold War propaganda playbook. I also mentioned the Gerasimov Doctrine, which is a new and particularly nasty variant of psychological warfare. It’s purpose is not to promote one view or party over another, but to so confuse the informational environment that people have no idea what’s going on. Worse, the lose faith that facts or truth are even knowable (in other words, they become postmodernists 🙂 ).

A recent piece in New York Magazine is an excellent summary, starting with the title: “How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.” The article has a lot to say about home-grown deceptions aimed at tricking people and businesses into thinking that online advertising is more effective than it really is:

Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.

But this isn’t news to anyone working in the Intelligence Community (IC). They’ve dealt with this sort of thing since spying was invented. I’ve long maintained that the primary difference between a scholar or some other kind of conventional information worker and someone in Intelligence is that the latter assumes someone is trying to deceive them.

Well folks, like it or not, we’re all spooks now.

The CIA Can Help!

The Central Intelligence Agency’s web site contains some fascinating stuff that anyone can read or download. Your tax dollars at work. It’s easy to spend hours reading about various operations, famous and not-so-famous spies, international incidents you probably never heard of, and so on. But there is also some interesting stuff on what is called “tradecraft“, which is “the techniques, methods and technologies used in modern espionage (spying) and generally, as part of the activity of intelligence.” I recently ran across an interesting short piece titled, “Fifteen Axioms for Intelligence Analysts.” It’s a quick and dirty guide on how not to get caught by someone else’s deceptions. Here are a few of the axioms:

Believe in your own professional judgments. Always be willing to listen to alternative conclusions or other points of view, but stand your ground if you really believe the intelligence supports a certain conclusion. Just because someone is your boss, is a higher grade, or has been around longer than you does not mean he or she knows more about your account than you do.

It is better to be mistaken than to be wrong. One of the hardest things to do is to admit that your original assessment was mistaken. Too many people in the DI (Directorate of Intelligence) refuse to admit a mistake or an incorrect assessment and to change their assessments in light of new facts. But it is always better to admit you were wrong and to change a position when the facts warrant it than to stand by an incorrect assessment in the face of new facts.

Avoid mirror imaging at all costs. Mirror imaging–projecting your thought process or value system onto someone else–is one of the greatest threats to objective intelligence analysis. Not everyone is alike, and cultural, ethnic, religious, and political differences do matter. Just because something seems like the logical conclusion or course of action to you does not mean that the person or group you are analyzing will see it that way, particularly when differences in values and thought processes come into play.

Whom Do You Trust?

There’s more stuff at the link, but there is an assumption in the list of axioms that I want to point out, which is that the audience is part of a community of information workers. American society is fragmented, and growing moreso. For people like us, the challenge is to form a community of people where we help each other sort though the bullshit without that community becoming a bubble. It is possible; reports from the 2016 election suggested that conservatives were more likely to uncritically pass on fake news, to the detriment of us all.

But at the end of the day, what really matters is trust. This is something I learned from my own experience with the IC. Duplicity is not nearly as valuable a personal commodity as trust and integrity. Finding our way through this smog of disinformation means knowing who to trust, and being trustworthy ourselves when it comes to news and information.

Incidentally, I’ve posted some open-source resources on information tradecraft to help ordinary folks learn how the pros do intelligence analysis. Check out The Spook’s Home Companion.