Misdirections & The Internet

"My sculptures are like no other known geometrical solid, but they look just like a cube, a pyramid or another known or absurd solid. This means that three observers at three different points would see three different solids." 

- Guido Moretti

The more intently we are occupied with something, the harder our system works to suppress distractions. Sometimes, we are skillfully distracted away from the real thing. Perception is constructive, following a predictive processing framework, which underlies why illusions occur. But our intent here is not to talk about magic, we'll do that some other time. Here we want to talk about the sometimes coercive influencing of perceptions, the skillful tunneling of our attention, the actors who may use that and the overarching cyber-enabled theater of these tricks.

Our actors may be groups/activists/hackers/guerillas/state/non-state/whatever with a political or reformist agenda. As per their situation, they may or may not use other and often more violent means of action. Our theater can be better conceptualized as a multi-agent system where each agent (actor) always maintains some local state carrying a representation of all the information which the actor has access to. Capabilities drive the actor intentions, but cultural ideologies, psychological and sometimes monetary benefits, as well as network externalities are primary drivers of behavior in this "theater".

There is emerging a lot of material on Russian and Chinese disinformation as well as hacking campaigns, it is arguable that this "material" itself is a countering mechanism of sorts. We don't know lots for sure so let us take another example, from the epic Mahabharat, day 15 of the Kurukshetra war. This because of two reasons, first that no one can object to the truth or falsehood of a mythology, and second, it makes a great example since we can see various elements of coercive influence operations in a single instance.

At the conceptual level, we can see multiple information classes and the leveraging of unique channel characteristics, also a great display of how an influential node can amplify emotions or curb resistance while building greater trust. There are different communication & influence paths, with a continuous notion of bombardment frequency and intensity. The core of disinformation was repeated thrice to Drona by different actors, while changing the nature of appeals with lots of fighting in between. This while the "celestials" were driving Drona's emotions and reasoning away from fighting, there is coinciding improvisation of inducement strategy throughout the operation. And most importantly from a cyber-driven perspective there is fake-forensics (dead elephant) to avoid inconsistency and leave a false trail backed by true evidences, which also allows for plausible deniability as well as perceptual ambiguity towards any bad self-knowledge among actors. Everything from indirect incitements to direct actions, interactions are directed towards the overall operational objective of attacking Drona's willingness to continue fighting by having him distracted and occupied with a falsehood.

The great strategist and the diplomatic finesse of neither fighting nor not-fighting. Image©watchalen

It is well known in general warfare, the general superiority of defense over attack, all things being equal. And even though military strategy is the domain of taking on the stronger opponent and taking on a weaker persistent opponent is what politicians were for, the advent of cyber-enabled operations has somewhat upended the traditional notions, including but not limited to the ideas of proportionality. David Deptula, when talking about armed drones once, noted that an actor can now project power without projecting vulnerability. This maximization of projected power while minimizing the projected vulnerability and the borderless quasi-intangible nature of cyber-enabled information operations, is markedly the defining shift in the conduct of war, arguably somewhat more threatening to the open-internet societies than the ones behind the firewalls.

Nevertheless, for big-brothers with many eyes, intelligence over internet traffic and telecommunications is only the baseline of information gathering. And with greater state capabilities, come innovations from the underground also. We are seeing ideological actors coordinating as leaderless and self-organizing trans-national networks, using less tech and even riding on international relations. Such systems (of networks) over time can become somewhat fault tolerant & resilient to a degree, if the environment is not shaped against them.

Sometimes actor actions can be attributable, but sometimes not attributable, and sometimes even misattributed. It is difficult to set expectations from future engagements if the prominent actions are a misdirection. With a leaderless system architecture comes the autonomy of peripheral attacks which puts the spotlight back over plausible deniability and perceptual ambiguity. We may see strategic shifts as stable actor behavior in such environments, even leveraging of crises and critical political events to widen any sense of distrust, doubt, disagreement and disarray among the adversary.

Come what may, our unconditional security proofs often rest over idealized assumptions. These illusions of security prevent us from making systemic changes. This may range from us not upgrading our vulnerable devices to our dear leaders overlooking contiguous societal necessities, like climate change for example. This is a pervasive human folly, we like the browsing experience so we don't turn off the JavaScript. And there is no best solution to this but akin to much of Sun Tzu tapestry is a Bruce Lee solution, be like water, LOL.